Every curator’s dream is to acquire in one fell swoop a collection, a place to show it and a scholarly catalogue of the holdings.
The dream has just come true at the Art Institute of Chicago.
Marilynn B. Alsdorf, vice chairman of the Institute board of trustees, last week gave the museum’s department of decorative arts a collection of 81 pieces of Renaissance jewelry plus the funds for a gallery to display it and a catalogue to be written by leading scholars.
Before the gift, the Institute owned perhaps a dozen examples of Renaissance jewelry. Now it has a collection that ranks among those at the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the finest public holdings of Renaissance jewelry in the United States.
“In essence, Marilynn has given us an entire context,” says Ian Wardropper, the Institute’s Eloise W. Martin Curator of European Decorative Arts and Sculpture and Classical Art.
“We didn’t have a context, in that we haven’t collected a lot of jewelry. But we now will be able to put together a gallery, also thanks to her, which will allow us to present the material, I think, comprehensively.”
As it turns out, some of the collection will, in a sense, be coming home, as several pieces were on view at the Institute from 1951 to 1962, under a long-term agreement with the previous owner, a member of an old family of financiers in New York.
“The Melvin Gutman collection had been on display at the Art Institute,” says Alsdorf, “and I remember seeing it. He showed pieces in Chicago, Baltimore and New York. I don’t think people at the museums ever thought they would get them as gifts. Gutman just put them there as a sort of safekeeping.
“Eventually, though, they came up for auction at Sothebys in New York, and we (Alsdorf and her late husband, James, a former president of the board of the Institute) bought the nucleus of the collection. We had a few pieces before that, but the most important things came then, in the 1960s.”
Jewelry is, of course, a body adornment, though Alsdorf seldom wore the pieces. However, on one occasion she did wear one and lived to regret it.
“At the Art Institute, during the opening of a large Renoir show,” Alsdorf recalls, “Jim Speyer, then curator of 20th Century art, came over and said, `What a lovely cross. Too bad the center stone was missing.’
“Well, I didn’t think it was missing, but it had fallen out just then, at the opening. So everybody got down on their hands and knees, in black ties and so on, and searched until we found the stone. Either it had broken when it hit the floor or someone had stepped on it.
“We had it restored and put back into the cross, but that was it. I did not wear any of the pieces outside of my home again, and we kept most of them in suede boxes in cabinets, showing them only to people who really were interested in a scholarly way, curators and collectors.”Renaissance pieces make up about a quarter of the entire Alsdorf jewelry collection, which may come to the Institute at a later time. As for now, a small jewelry gallery is being planned for one of a suite of rooms located around McKinlock Court, and it should accommodate the 81 pieces nicely.
“For purposes of display, the gift is comprehensive in terms of the countries of origin,” Wardropper says. “It ranges from Sicily, Italy, Spain, up through England and the North, into Germany.
“It also covers the period very generously, talking about the Renaissance from the 15th Century on into the 18th Century, which I think one can say because the traditions continue quite long.
“It covers a range of functions, from religious (crosses, reliquaries) to secular (rings and so on). It has a range of types, from hat badges to pendants; and a range of workmanship, from enamelwork, to intaglio carving to goldwork. Finally, it also shows a range of quality, from works on the very highest level to works that are more typical.”
Alsdorf says putting together the collection involved no great searches for pieces and no conscious filling of gaps. She and her husband decided to acquire only those objects that stood on their own regardless of ethnic or historical importance.
She sees the pieces as miniature sculptures, preferring those that can be viewed completely in the round, perhaps because of the many large-scale sculptures she and her husband also collected.
A favorite piece in the gift is a tiny crystal box that once was a reliquary for St. Felix.
“This has got quite an odd story,” says Wardropper. “It comes from the Sacred Treasury in Vienna. Several years ago, John Hayward, one of the foremost silver and jewelry experts, wrote a long article on a man named Salomon Weininger, who lived in Vienna and had the job of making copies of objects in the Holy Treasury.
“Only, he didn’t return the originals. About six or seven originals circulated, and this (reliquary) is one of them. It’s a superb object, probably Roman or Central Italian from the mid-16th Century, which has satyr-atlantids, that is, little figures holding up the four corners and in between are crystal engravings after compositions by Raphael.”
Other favorites include a head of John the Baptist on a carnelian platter with a Latin inscription that says “Pray for us”; a hat badge from the end of the 15th Century that followed changes in fashion by being converted into a pendant in the 16th Century; and an ancient cameo head of the emperor Augustus set in a mount of the early 16th Century that bears a scene of trees and the personal motto “Thrive always.”
Alsdorf would like to see the pieces displayed so viewers have access to both sides, as has been done in a museum installation of a famous jade collection in Seattle. She also envisions the space dimly and dramatically lighted, though she acknowledges this is a touchy business requiring enough restraint to keep from overpowering the jewelry with too much theater.
Whatever the plans for the gallery, Wardropper says the gift comes at a particularly opportune time, owing to the extent and quality of the research on jewelry done during the last 20 years. The Institute holdings will benefit from such research, and to continue it, two scholars from Great Britain already have begun going through the collection.
“People tend to forget how important some media were at the time they were made,” Wardropper says. “For instance, textiles were once enormously important and aren’t as highly regarded now as a major art form. The same is true of jewelry.
“Jewelry also is a barometer of society, saying quite a lot about the wearers and their concerns. I think this is something people are more and more interested in gaining from the arts in general. For instance, Renaissance jewelry speaks about the vast new wealth, the importation of precious materials, the interests of people, either religious or secular. Although the works are small, I think they allow you to understand something about how people behaved and what their aspirations were.
“So the pieces here are both artforms at the highest level and personal talismans that allow you to grasp the nature of people’s thought. If this sounds like a mini-sermon, I’m sorry. I just meant to say that these works have a lot in them, and I hope people will take the time to look for it.”
Seven pieces from the Alsdorf gift are on view in Gunsaulus Hall of the Art Institute of Chicago with other decorative objects from the Renaissance. The full collection will not be shown until the completion of the new jewelry gallery in 1994 or ’95.
