Another “Icon” In The WSJ: 17th Century Saint Sebastian Debuts

Another Saturday, another icon to relish. Dealer Andrew Butterfield is about to reveal a 17th century ivory that he says he has rediscovered — which is to say, it has been buried in a private collection for a very long time, but is soon to make its public debut with a new attribution. And by the way, it’s more than two feet tall — pretty monumental for an ivory figure.

Last week, I posted here about a short “Backstory” article about a Yup’ik mask on the Icons page of the Saturday Wall Street Journal. This week, I’ve written a brief “Object of Desire” article for the Icons page.

The object in question is an ivory carving of Saint Sebastian (detail at left), and Butterfield bought it from a South American dealer last year. A few other dealers saw it — the South American had it with him at the TEFAF fair in Maastricht last March, but he did not put it on public view. Only Butterfield, who has — I’m told by others in the field — a great eye, saw something worth betting on. He bought it, and spent the time since then researching it and having it cleaned up by the Metropolitan Museum.

Butterfield says the ivory is by Jacobus Agnesius, a little-known Germanic artist whose only universally-agreed works are in the Louvre and a museum in Albi, France. The Prince of Lichtenstein owns two other carvings thought by many to be by Agnesius.

Butterfield engaged Eike Schmidt, the head of the Minneapolis Institute of Art’s Department of Decorative Arts, Textiles & Sculpture and a recognized expert on ivories, to write the catalogue essay. And others, including Nicholas Penny, formerly curator at the National Gallery of Art in Washington and now director of the National Gallery in London, says the essay, and the attribution, are totally convincing.

Quoting from Schmidt in the catalogue:

The highly dramatic Saint Sebastian is a work of extraordinary artistic ambition and achievement. It epitomizes the Baroque artistic ideal to express the strongest, deepest and most sublime emotions via an extreme muscular tension and contortion of the human body. Spanning 64 centimeters (25.2 in.) from the right foot to the left index finger, it is amongst the largest ivory figures ever made. As the size alone indicates, the hitherto unpublished Saint Sebastian must have been a very important commission for Jacobo Agnesius, whose oeuvre is systematically reconstructed and analyzed in the following pages for the first time.

And:

 

The statuette represents a young man with a heroic, muscular build, and long and thick curly hair, who is naked save for a loincloth. He stands on his right foot, with his left leg, bent at the knee, raised and extended behind him. His arms are crossed in a complex, asymmetrical position as they jut upward over his head and in front of his body. Cords of rope bind his left wrist and right elbow. His torso arcs forcefully to the proper left, and he throws his head back over his left shoulder. As originally mounted, the figure was shown tied to a tree, which was made either of wood or metal. The figure’s complex and twisting stance is meant to convey both the weight of his body hanging down from the tree (note, for example, the tension of his painfully extended arms), and the violent thrusts of his body as he writhes in pain and tries to free himself.

 

The anatomy is rendered with astonishing precision. Every detail of the musculature and skeleton is recorded.

And:

 

The newly discovered Saint Sebastian is principally carved from one piece of ivory, which extends from the figure’s feet up to the middle of his biceps. Agnesius added two separately carved units, one for each arm, to the main segment of ivory….

Penny told me he found it all “rather exciting.” 

 

Butterfield will be showing the piece from Jan. 21 through Feb. 4 at Moretti Fine Art in New York. He’s asking $4.75 million for it.

 

Photo Credit: Maggie Nimkin, Courtesy Andrew Butterfield