October 31, 2000
CONTENTS:
- Hot Art Cold Cash on line
- Stolen fossils sold to Germany
- Arts Minister has placed bars on the export of two fifteenth-century silver and silver-gilt reliquary and pen and watercolour painting William Blake
'Hot Art Cold Cash'
This infamous book is out of print but now available on line (free, in several downloadable formats) at: http://www.michelvanrijn.com/finish/hacc.htm A synopsis of the sequel to this book (due 2001) is on line as well.
Stolen fossils sold to Germany
BY SHIRLEY ENGLISH
FOSSILS found in Scotland of the world's earliest known creature with a backbone have been stolen and sold to a museum in Germany. Scottish Natural Heritage was alerted last February after an academic reported seeing the 430 million-year-old remains in a museum in Berlin.
After lengthy negotiations a team of Scottish Natural Heritage geologists are going to the Humboldt University museum to discuss their possible return. The 8in jawless fish, Jamoytius kerwoodi, has only been found on a river bank in Lanarkshire, which has been designated a Site of Special Scientific Interest. It is thought it was raided several times by a foreign collector who knew what he was looking for.
Several perfect fossils of the ancient fish, the first known creature with a backbone, were hacked from the rock. Each fossil is worth about £10,000. The raid meant that scores of other fossils, including a crustacean, Ainiktozoon loganese, were destroyed. There are believed to be only 150 Ainiktozoon loganese fossils in the world, all from Scotland.
Colin MacFadyen, the geologist leading the delegation,said yesterday that he accepted the museum had bought the fossils in good faith but it was important to establish that the remains had been obtained without permission of the landowner and without a licence. The talks will focus on the fossils return to Scotland and Scottish Natural Heritage could offer to buy them back.
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,27440,00.html
ARTS MINISTER PLACES TEMPORARY EXPORT BARS ON TWO LATE GOTHIC SILVER RELIQUARY STATUETTES AND A MAJOR PAINTING BY WILLIAM BLAKE
Arts Minister Alan Howarth has placed temporary bars on the export of two fifteenth-century silver and silver-gilt reliquary figures of Saint Sebastian and St Christopher and the pen and watercolour painting, God Blessing the Seventh Day, by the major British Romantic artist, William Blake (1757-1827). This will provide a last chance to raise the money to keep the items in the United Kingdom.
The Minister's ruling follows recommendations by the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art that the export decisions be deferred. This reflects the outstanding aesthetic value and technical quality of the reliquary statuettes and the watercolour's importance as a powerful expression of Blake's art.
The deferrals will enable purchase offers to be made at or above the following recommended prices:
- A parcel-gilt reliquary figure of Saint Sebastian, deferred at the recommended price of #2,015,906.25 (plus VAT where applicable) until after 23 January 2001;
- A parcel-gilt reliquary figure of Saint Christopher, deferred at the recommended price of #1,792,406.25 (plus VAT where applicable) until after 23 January 2001;
In each case, the deferral period could be extended until after 23 May 2001 if there is a serious intention to raise funds with a view to making an offer to purchase. The Committee has strongly urged that every effort should be made to raise the necessary funds to purchase both statuettes, because of their close association in terms of their exceptional quality and rarity.
- God Blessing the Seventh Day by William Blake; deferred until after 23 January 2001; recommended price #650,000 (plus VAT where applicable).
The deferral period could be extended until after 23 April 2001 if there is a serious intention to raise funds with a view to making an offer to purchase.
Announcing the deferrals today, Arts Minister Alan Howarth commented:
"Seldom do such exquisite and rare silver works come to the attention of the Reviewing Committee. Their elegance of design and their well documented journey through the centuries make them especially important."
"God Blessing the Seventh Day by William Blake radiates the genius of this Romantic artist. This fine work is particularly significant because it marks the beginning of the biblical cycle for his patron, Thomas Butts. "
"I hope that offers to purchase these exceptional items will be made in due course."
Anyone interested in making an offer to purchase any of the items should contact the owners' agents through:
The Secretary
The Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art
Department for Culture, Media and Sport
2-4 Cockspur Street
London SW1Y 5DH
Notes to Editors
Saint Christopher (height 47 cm), the patron of travellers, is shown wading through a turbulent river, holding a staff in his left hand and supporting on his right shoulder the Christ child, whose right hand is raised in blessing.
Saint Sebastian (height 49.5cm), believed in the Middle Ages to protect the beholder from plague, is shown with his right arm bent and his left arm raised and lashed to a bare tree by a corded rope. The body is finely modelled, chased with musculature and veining and pierced by five holes and two silver-gilt arrows. A drawing attributed to Hans Holbein the Elder of Saint Sebastian now in the British Museum may be a preliminary design for this figure.
The reliquary figures are of outstanding aesthetic importance and superb technical quality, with a rare and exceptionally interesting provenance (both medieval and more modern) and known patrons and date a combination of features found on very few surviving medieval works of art of any sort.
The Saint Christopher is inscribed with the date 1493, and originally bore on its base the arms of the Holy Roman Emperor (for the Emperor Maximilian), those of the Cistercian monastery of Kaisheim (near Augsburg in Germany) and those of its abbot between 1490 and 1509, Abbot George Kastner. The Saint Sebastian is inscribed with the date 1497 and the names Duke Frederick III, the Emperor Maximilian, and Abbot George Kastner. An almost contemporary chronicle of the monastery describes the generosity of Abbot Kastner, specially mentioning the gift of silver images of Saints Christopher and Sebastian.
The post-medieval history of the figures tells the story of nineteenth-century collecting taste in a way few other objects can. Both are presumed to have left Kaisheim at the time of secularisation in 1802-3 and to have come on to the art market. Their first known collector was the Paris-based Russian Prince Soltykoff. Baron Achille Seilliere, also Paris-based, bought numbers of pieces for Soltykoff and, after the Prince's death in 1861, seems gradually to have dispersed his collection. It seems likely that the discriminating art collector Sir Julius Wernher then acquired the reliquaries direct from Seilliere. The stars of Wernher's silver collection, the figures are emblematic of the long Anglo-German cultural relationship ended by World War One.
The thoroughness of English iconoclasm in the sixteenth century almost totally destroyed the shrines and reliquaries which had so long formed one of the most important expressive outlets for the goldsmith. Very little figural medieval silver now exists anywhere to demonstrate the sophisticated skill of the pre-Renaissance goldsmith, which makes the survival of these two pieces extremely rare.
God Blessing the Seventh Day, by William Blake (1757-1827)
God Blessing the Seventh Day (42 x 35.5cm) is one of eighty-eight finished watercolours illustrating subjects from the Bible which Blake painted for his most important patron, Thomas Butts, between 1800 and about 1805-6. The thirty-four Old Testament subjects and fifty-four New Testament subjects form a distinct cycle, reflecting both the patron's taste as well as Blake's own ambitions for his art: he said that 'The Old and New Testaments are the Great Code of Art'.
The significance of the subject of God Blessing the Seventh Day in relation to the Butts cycle and Blake's writings is matched by the work's deceptively simple visual power. Much of this impact derives from the strongly symmetrical mandorla-like motif, placed in the centre of the sheet, of the seated God surrounded by singing angels whose hands, arms and wings frame Him. Blake took his inspiration for such a compositional device from the idea of a ceiling boss, the carved round or oval keystone showing figures or natural ornament, found at the meeting point of the ribs of a Gothic vault. His choice of such an assertive compositional form was very deliberate, having its roots in Blake's time as an apprentice in the 1770s when he was making drawings of the mediaeval tombs in Westminster Abbey. It refers to his belief that 'Gothic is living form' and to his embracing of Michelangelo as 'One of the Gothic Artists who built the Cathedrals in what we call the Dark Ages'.
In the context of Blake's writings, God Blessing the Seventh Day is also relevant to the artist's view of the negative aspect of the Creation in which God's Commandments shape Man's enslavement to the material world. God's 'Blessing' becomes the Fourth Commandment: 'Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy'. In Blake's mythology, the figure of Urizen, comparable in his looks and his acts to the Old Testament God shown in this and other images, is the creator of 'iron laws'. God Blessing the Seventh Day is a crucial key both to a reading of the Butts cycle and also to an understanding of a central figure in Blake's mythology.
The cycle is now in collections across the globe, just under half of it remaining in the UK. With the first work from the cycle, The Creation of Light, untraced since 1853, God Blessing the Seventh Day effectively stands as the sole surviving work from Blake's cycle, and the only one in this country, which can in any way be said to announce its beginning.
Department for Culture, Media and Sport
2-4 Cockspur Street
London SW1Y 5DH