Product Code Database
Often paired as garden ornaments since the later 17th century with the similar Borghese Vase,The difference in height between the Medici vase and the Borghese vase amount to about two centimeters; see paired early 19th-century bronze vases. Both were available in artificial Lithodipyra (Coade stone) from 1771. The Medici Vase from the pair ordered from Eleanor Coade for George IV is at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (Alison Kelly, "Coade Stone in Georgian Gardens", Garden History 16.2 (Autumn 1988:109–133) p 111. they are two of the most admired and influential vases from antiquity.Several 17th and 18th-century variants are illustrated in John Goldsmith Phillips, "The Choisy-Ménars Vases" The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, New Series, 25.6 (February 1967:242–250). The place of the Medici Vase in the Western canon of Greek and Roman remains may be gauged by its prominent position in the composed views or capricci that were a specialty of the Roman painter Giovanni Paolo Panini, to pick the outstanding example.Panini's composed View of Roman Monuments, featuring the Medici Vase, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art is illustrated in Richard Paul Wunder, "Panini's View of Roman Monuments", Philadelphia Museum of Art Bulletin 56 (Winter 1961:54–56) p. 55; in the catalogue of the most influential Roman antiquities in Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture 1500–1900 (1981) the Medici Vase is cat. no. 82. Angelica Kauffman painted the second Lord Berwick on his Grand Tour seated beside the vase.The Angelica Kauffman portrait of the second Lord Berwick seated beside the vase is at Attingham Park (National Trust): noted in Wendy Wassyng Roworth, "Painting for Profit and Pleasure: Angelica Kauffman and the Art Business in Rome" Eighteenth-Century Studies 29.2 (Winter 1995/1996:225-228) p. 226.
Many "copies", sometimes rather loose, were made to decorate palaces or their gardens. The Medici Vase remains a popular subject for imitation in bronze or porcelain, for example by Wedgwood. Material on the many later decorative versions of the pairing can be found at Borghese Vase.
|
|
