2.5 Conclusion
In a biographical note on Mathieu Kessels, Emile Verhaeren (1855-1916) severely judged the artistic merits of the sculptor who had died decades earlier: ‘He followed the others, he never preceded’ [29].1 The phrase typifies the reception of classical and academic sculpture by the late 19th-century modern art movement, which was not so different from the general art historical discourse that would develop in the 20th century. An aestheticism of imitation and emulation was at stake, the very principle that had determined sculptural production from the first half of the 19th century. Neoclassicism had begun to lose momentum in the 1830s, and its values were cast aside. During the second quarter of the 19th century, the classical world and its sculptural interpretation by Canova and Thorvaldsen remained the ultimate reference, as the typology of the bather has shown us. For those who were convinced that this was the highest reachable goal in art, imitation and emulation provided a logical method of producing artworks, striving to come ever closer to an ideal art.2 For others who placed more value in alternative aesthetics, emulation appeared to be a self-indulgent system propagating artistic immobility. It must have been depressing for them to think that the identity of contemporary sculptural art had been defined in Rome around 1800.
The artists who lived and worked in Rome for several years returned to their countries as representatives of refined taste and technical mastership. Many of them became pre-eminent artists who occupied influential positions in art schools and public institutions. All together, they established an international style.3 Fraikin’s Cupid Captive illustrates how these aesthetics, transmitted from one generation to another, merged into a normative art. It is a quintessential case because it demonstrates how art in its capacity as a commercial good can be disconnected from authorship. At the same time it is amusing that a statue conceived in the 1840s by a Belgian artist who adhered to an international stylistic trend that originated in Rome decades earlier, was counterfeited in Italy. Clearly, all roads led to Rome. Cupid Captive was sold on the Italian art market to an international clientele, probably including many tourists who identified the model as a typical classical composition. Paradoxically, the unauthorised second life of the artwork was the ultimate compliment to the artist while, at the same time, his authorship was denied.
29
Louis-Eugène Simonis, Portrait of sculptor Mathieu Kessels (1784-1836), ca. 1840,
marble, 59 x 34.5 x 27 cm,
Royal Museums of Fine Art of Belgium, Brussels, inv. no. 559