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Title:
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Peace Trophy
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Artist: |
Baron Carlo Marochetti
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The Crimean Peace Trophy was unveiled by Queen Victoria during the Peace Fete, held at the Crystal Palace, Sydenham, on 9 May 1856. A few weeks earlier, a reporter had found Marochetti working on the female personification of Peace, which was to surmount the trophy. and gave an account of what he described as Marochetti's "bold experiment, in the Times of 16 April. "The bust and arms of this statue are to be gilded; the rest of the body regarded as a lay figure, and clothed with velvet and silver. It is perhaps impossible to predict what will be the result of such a novelty, connected, as it is in our minds, with some of the vulgar associations of waxwork; all that can be said is that no-one is better entitled than Baron Marochettti to make experiments of this kind, and that nowhere is the experiment more likely to be successful than in the Crystal Palace".
At the fete, the trophy acted as a kind of exhilarating foil to the greyer and more funereal full-scale model of Marochetti's memorial for the English cemetery at Scutari. Both, according to a reporter for the Daily News (12 May 1856), had been "erected by the Directors of the Crystal Palace at an enormous outlay, and only partly completed at the opening of the ceremony after the strenuous exertion of artists and workmen, who had been labouring the whole of the preceding night by gaslight".
Whilst the model of the Scutari Memorial was unveiled to the accompaniment of the Marche Funèbre from Beethoven's Eroica Symphony, a more exultant note was sounded for the trophy, when the band played "See the Conquering Hero Comes". Excited anticipation preceded the unveiling of the trophy, according to the report of the event in the Illustrated London News (17 May 1856), "consequently, when the screen was removed there was general rush to get a good sight of it". This reporter was certainly employing diplomatic understatement in claiming that there was "very little doubt that the most sanguine were satisfied by its appearance". This was a discreet way of suggesting that all were not. Indeed that was confirmed by a number of newspaper reports. From these, and from various engravings and one good painting of the event, it is possible to describe the appearance of the trophy. All the flesh passages of the figure of Peace appear to have been silvered, rather than gilded, as had been stated in the earlier report in the Times. Her robe was of white velvet, and over her shoulders was draped a golden cloak. In one hand she held out a real olive branch, whilst in the other she held some ears of corn, signifying peace and plenty. The figure stood on a bulbous vase or urn, whose body was encircled with masks and swags. This, according to the Morning Chronicle (10 May 1856), was the colur of "raspberry ice". The vase in its turn was supported on a circular temple-like structure in green marble or scagliola, its cornice decorated with grotesque masks. The eight panels on its sides each had a niche, in which it was intended to place further allegorical figures, but these were not completed on time. According to the Illustrated London News, some reproductions of "celebrated statues of the early Italian School", were grouped around the base for the Peace Fete, but from the illustrations, it is clear that on that occasion the niches remained empty.
The critical response to the trophy was fairly devastating. It was compared in the Morning Chronicle (10 May 1856) to a twelfth-cake, and in the Daily News (12 May 1856) to "a gigantic moderator lamp". The reporter for the Morning Chronicle deemed that the tropy would "settle for ever the question of colour as applied to sculpture", and went on: "A more hideous mistake was never perpetrated in art. Everybody's opinion was the same - the most cultivated in taste, the most uneducated in art, saw at a glance the error that had been committed".
Nevertheless, Marochetti's trophy appears to have inspired the directors of the Crystal Palace Company to come up with their own, no doubt more tasteful, version two years later, for the Inkerman Fete, held on 5 November 1858. This trophy, designed by Mr Hayes, director of the palace's Fine Art Department, deployed a number of plaster models of works by the German sculptor C.D. Rauch, which were already in its collection. Four of the famous Geniuses of Fame for the Regensburg Walhalla, sat around its base, and it was crowned by a standing Victory, also by Rauch.
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Material(s): |
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Medium: |
Unassigned |
Finish: |
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Technique: |
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Genre: |
Unassigned
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Colours: |
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Year: |
1856 |
Height: |
0 metres |
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0 metres |
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0 metres |
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Key: |
2262 |
Acc. No.: |
2262 |
Col. No.: |
2262 |
Number of views: |
2842 |
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