Giacomo and Giovanni Zoffoli

Hugh Honour FRSL (1927-2016) and John Fleming (1919-2001), Villa Marchiò, Tofori, Tuscany, Italy;

Sotheby's London, 5 December 2017, lot 119;

Where acquired by Karsten Schubert Ltd

H. Honour, 'Bronze Statuettes by Giacomo and Giovanni Zoffoli', The Connoisseur, November 1961, p. 205, no. 17

This signed bronze by the Zoffoli brothers is cast after the antique marble in the Capitoline Museums, Rome. First recorded in the Ludovisi Collection in 1623, it was acquired for the Capitoline Museums by Pope Clement XII, before being ceded to the French in 1797. The sculpture arrived in Paris in a triumphal procession and was housed in the Musée Central des Arts. After Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in 1815, it was returned to the Capitoline Museums, where its fame was such that it was displayed in a dedicated room named after it.

The subject was long interpreted as a Gladiator until late 19th-century scholarship identified the poignant figure as a wounded Galatian, whose army invaded the Hellenistic kingdom of Pergamon in the third century AD. Since the marble’s discovery, its popularity has spawned numerous reductions in bronze. The present bronze is listed in Honour's annotated list of the Zoffoli workshop, being the only signed version to his knowledge, in the collection of Mr. John Fleming.

Karsten Schubert (1961-2019)

Karsten Schubert was an influential Anglo-German art dealer who played a leading role in promoting the Young British Artists (YBAs) in the 1980s and 1990s. Schubert exhibited the likes of Rachel Whiteread, Alison Wilding, Gary Hume, Michael Landy and Ian Davenport, as well as then more internationally well-known artists such as Gerhard Richter and Bridget Riley. Later in life Schubert founded Ridinghorse a high-end art historical publisher, named after an art space he had opened in 1995 with Charles Asprey and Thomas Dane.

In Schubert’s obituary in The Guardian, Charles Darwent noted that, ‘For all his love of Britain and English tailoring – he became a British citizen not long before his death – he had a depth of culture and historical understanding that remained admirably German…. When he wrote his own history of museology, The Curator’s Egg (2000), it was with the easy assurance of one who could quote Marcus Aurelius from memory’.

Karsten Schubert was a member of the Faculty of the Fine Arts of the British School at Rome, and sat on the Advisory Board of Drawing Room London. His personal art collection including drawings by Cezanne and Mondrian, as well as ancient sculpture. Schubert’s interest in Grand Tour bronzes cast after antique models reflects both his erudition and his rich intellectual heritage.

RELATED LITERATURE

F. Haskell and N. Penny, Taste and the Antique. The Lure of Classical Sculpture 1500-1900, New Haven and London, pp. 224-227, no. 44