GRAND CHRIST in bronze with remains of gilding.... - Lot 138 - Pierre Bergé & Associés

Lot 138
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15000 - 25000 EUR
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Result : 19 000EUR
GRAND CHRIST in bronze with remains of gilding.... - Lot 138 - Pierre Bergé & Associés
GRAND CHRIST in bronze with remains of gilding. Head girdled with a floral crown, beautiful face with regular features and short beard, ends of the locks of hair resting on the shoulders, arms horizontal, abdomen slightly prominent, long asymmetrical perizonium knotted on the left hip revealing the side of the thigh, straight folds in relief converging towards the knot, legs parallel and feet juxtaposed. Aachen, ca. 1215 Height: 20.6 cm - Width: 18.4 cm (worn down by gilding, missing fingers) The exact model of this great Christ is not found in Peter Bloch's work. Approaching examples are listed (VII A 9 to A 13) with notable differences in particular in the head with a less severe face, the hair whose locks do not rest on the shoulders in the same way and the perizonium still knotted on the other hip. The author expresses doubts about the antiquity of these Christs, which he indicates as being from Aachen, around 1215, by putting forward the hypothesis of a nineteenth-century Colonese reproduction. Erich Meyer, a great German specialist of medieval bronzes, had named this model the "Beau Dieu" and attributed it to the goldsmith of Charlemagne's Saxon Saxon, completed around 1215 and preserved in the choir of Aachen Cathedral. The original copy of this Christ would have belonged to a crucifix from this city that a canon named Göbbels gave to the Church of St. Mary of the Capitol in Cologne around 1880. It is suspected that a colonial forger made several copies. The copy in the Davioud collection, for its part, shows no trace of alteration of the gilding by acid as on the copies published in the Bloch, and nothing in its manufacture suggests a forgery from the end of the 19th century. Work consulted: P. Bloch, Romanische Bronzekruzifixe, Berlin, 1992, VII A 9 to A 13.
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