Between November 2024 and July 2025 Karl-Magnus Brose will be hosted in Berlin, Rome and London as a Census x Hertziana x Warburg fellow. The fellowship was first inaugurated as a partnership between the Census and the Hertziana in 2022, and expanded in 2023 to include the Warburg Institute.
Karl Brose is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art at the University of Virginia. His specialty is European sculptural aesthetics of the early modern period with a focus on the international exchange of objects and ideas through the reproduction of antiquities in the eighteenth century. His research in Paris and Rome has been supported by the University of Virginia’s Dumas Malone Research Fellowship and the Société des Professeurs Français et Francophones d’Amérique.
Karl-Magnus Brose: Forms of the Antique: Edme Bouchardon and the Sculptural Imaginary, 1723–1762
In 1737, the sculptor Edme Bouchardon (1698–1762) made the bold and unprecedented move of exhibiting a drawing of an ancient engraved gem at the Paris salon. Thought to have been the personal seal of Alexander the Great, the gem purportedly passed through Michelangelo’s hands before entering the cabinet of Louis XV. Exhibiting the drawing with a wax impression of the original attached, Bouchardon positioned himself as the authoritative mediator between the ancient and the modern, between the Hellenic ruler, the French king and a broader public. Paradoxically, it was only by being imprinted, enlarged, reversed, and ultimately engraved for an illustrated volume on the art of antiquity that the original seal could transmit the authority of the antique. These operations were characteristic of forms of small, handheld sculpture such as gems, medallions and cameos that were translated across a range of materials, including wax, plaster, glass and print during the early eighteenth century. My dissertation traces the reproductions and exchanges by which these objects circulated between London, Paris and Rome and asks what kind of sculptural imaginary of the antique they produced. How might these objects, today separated into the category of decorative arts or jewelry, let us rethink the nachleben of the antique beyond the paradigm of marble statuary that has organized the history of sculpture and the reception of antiquity?
My Census project focuses on the third chapter of my dissertation, titled “Media Transfers and the Reinvention of the Antique in Edme Bouchardon’s Roman Portraits”. I examine a series of all’antica portrait busts Bouchardon carved of notable foreign diplomats, visitors and residents of Rome between 1727–1732. Bouchardon established an international reputation with his bust of Baron von Stosch (1691–1757), a leading antiquarian and collector of ancient engraved gems who had settled in Rome in 1717. Art historians have described the bust as a transitional artwork marked by a “proto-neoclassical” stylistic opposition to decorative rococo sculpture, and by an archaeological fidelity to ancient models, anticipating the precepts of imitation laid down in the work of Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768) at midcentury. However, the busts carved by Bouchardon were reproduced and translated into a surprising variety of media by members of Stosch’s circle: engraved gems, bronze medals, ivory medallions, plaster casts, clay models, drawing and print. These objects were exchanged among the sitters as tokens of friendship and as experiments in the imitation of the antique. I will examine how these media transfers and the move from in-the-round to relief served as a point of experimentation for testing materials and the qualities of line and surface used to understand and reinvent both the art of antiquity and modern sculpture. These experiments also provide an important precedent for the art-historical and philosophical significance that sculptural contour would later acquire in German aesthetics through the writings of J.G. Herder and G.W.F. Hegel.
