Subject:
Hortense de Corneillan is devoting her research to the history of the restoration of archaeological objects in the 19th century. She is particularly interested in a collection of vases discovered in Etruscan necropolises and assembled around 1860 by the Roman goldsmith Augusto Castellani. A major figure in Ottocentric collecting, Augusto Catellani (1823-1883) and his brother Alessandro (1823-1883) were exceptional craftsmen, influential businessmen and key players in the European antiquities market. Through them, hundreds of vases found their way into public collections, either through acquisition or donation. Through her study of this collection, Hortense de Corneillan proposes a change of perspective: rather than considering ancient restorations as alterations dictated by the practices of the antiquarian market, she analyses them as veritable archival documents, essential for research and for the history of taste and archaeological collections.
Form:
Design of a museographic section at the Musée Cantonal d’Archéologie et d’Histoire de Lausanne (MCAH)
At the invitation of Lionel Pernet, Director of the MCAH, Hortense de Corneillan will design a section devoted to the formal and stylistic manipulations carried out on archaeological objects in the 19th century. The discussion will be based on a group of Etrurian vases and bronzes collected by Adolphe Noël des Vergers around 1850. This collection includes a significant number of pastiches, artistic creations made from scattered fragments that capture the imaginary world associated with Etruscan artistic identity at the time. These pastiches are all the more interesting in that some of them have similar pieces in North American collections.
The museographic display will evoke our shifting relationship with the materiality of works of art, reveal the processes of identity appropriation involved in collecting, and offer food for thought on questions of authenticity and representativeness in ancient archaeological and anthropological collections.