Bright Ideas In The (Lapidary) Works

July 2 2009, 2:59pm

A Pair of Late 18th c. Russian Hardstone and Gilt-Bronze Mounted Candlesticks. Carlton Hobbs LLC. While the art of crafting furniture and decorative objects from hardstones was already highly developed in Western Europe during the Renaissance, it was not until the mid-18th century, when St. Petersburg was being built, that the Russian lapidary arts began to flourish. In 1721, Peter the Great (1672-1725) founded the first imperial Russian lapidary at Peterhof, near St. Petersburg. “Under the monarchs who ruled Russia from the 1730s to the 1750s, the factory established itself as one of the leading creators of luxury goods in Eastern Europe,”1 with marbles and semiprecious stones brought to St. Petersburg from all corners of the Empire and beyond. After Peterhof, two other major manufactories were founded at Ekaterinburg in the Ural Mountains (1726), and at Kolyvan in the Altai Mountains (1786). By the end of the century Russia’s rich mineral deposits were vastly exploited and countless varieties of stone were discovered. The interest in mineralogy and geologic exploration throughout the 18th century was so intense it was called “a common disease”2 by Empress Catherine the Great, who herself had become an enthusiast. Most discoveries were made as a result of official expeditions, as it was the imperial crown that had both the finances and the rights to exploit the land, a monopoly which greatly enriched the royal collection. The long list of deposits discovered in the late 18th- and 19th-century included breccias, jaspers, quartzes, agate, malachite, and porphyry. Pair of hardstone columnar table decorations from the Stroganoff collection, 1790. The State Hermitage Museum. (Photo: Hunter-Stiebel, Penelope. Stroganoff. Portland, 2000.) This pair of candlesticks in our collection is an example of the work produced in the Russian manufactories’ earlier years. Up until the 18th century, decorative stonecutting had been limited mainly to relatively small objects. “Tremendous difficulties [were] encountered in the making of these hard stone pieces”3 due, in part, to the distance and struggle of transporting large sections of stone between quarry and factory, which was costly in both time and labor. Instead smaller samples of stones were sent to the factories, “ensuring the use of a wide variety of specimens”4 in objects such as vases, obelisks, and candlesticks. Additionally, special care had to be taken not only in the quarrying and transport of these hard and brittle semi-precious materials but also in their cutting and polishing. An example of late 18th century Russian stonework related to the present candlesticks, is a pair of columnar table decorations made at the Kolyvan Lapidary Works in 1790 for the Stroganoff Palace, and now in The Hermitage (figure 1). The columns, like the present pieces, represent the smaller, earlier objects made and use of a red jasper for the top and base, and a quartz for the shaft. Count Alexander Stroganoff (1733-1811) was a great collector and patron of the arts, president of the Imperial Academy of Arts and, in 1800, became the director for the Imperial Lapidary works, generating many changes and improvements which would result in larger and more ambitious carved hardstone decorations in the years to come. Footnotes: 1. Koeppe, Wolfram, Anna Maria Giusti, and Cristina Acidini Luchinat. Art of the Royal Court: Treasures in Pietre Dure from the Palaces of Europe. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2008. 350; 2. Ibid 67; 3. Chenevière, Antoine. Russian Furniture: The Golden Age, 1780-1840. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1988. 270; 4. Ibid 264.