When Sotheby’s (25% buyer’s premium) online sale titled Small Wonders: Early Gems and Jewels closed on July 9, a virtuoso sardonyx cameo of the head of Medusa had reached £65,000 – 10 times its estimate. Snakes aliveĪ sardonyx cameo of Medusa probably by Luigi Saulini – £65,000 at Sotheby’s. Six years working in Rome helped focus his tastes for the Grand Tour mosaics and hardstone cameos and intaglios offered as the first 28 lots of the sale.
INTAGLIO SEAL TV
Grice lived frugally in Brisbane – he never owned a car nor a TV – but was a polymath collector.
However, after selling at Aus$42,000 (£23,100) at the auction on July 8, there was at least a suggestion that it was closer to Marchant’s hand than the estimate of Aus$500-800 might have suggested. This gem, from the estate of Grice, was deemed one of the many copies. The British Museum has several including a plaster cast of Marchant’s intaglio and a James Tassie reproduction. He signed it Marchant F Romae.īoth the fragmentary cameo (now thought to be Renaissance after the antique) and Marchant’s sard intaglio (destroyed during the Second World War) were widely available in impressions. Marchant was invited to copy it and fill in the missing elements including the right-hand figure of a seated Achilles and the head of a woman in a Phrygian cap. He based his composition on an incomplete ‘ancient’ cameo made famous by the German archaeologist and art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-68) which is now in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. The scene cut to this intaglio is The Grief of Achilles Upon the Death of Patroclus after a lost work by the celebrated British gem cutter Nathaniel Marchant (1739-1816).