Leseprobe

6 Sculpture as one of the collecting passions of Augustus the Strong The most decisive augmentations to the electoral art collections occurred however during the reign of Friedrich August I of Saxony, known as ‘Augustus the Strong’ (r. 1694–1733). Between 1723 and 1726, the Saxon elector – who was also the king of Poland and the Grand Duke of Lithuania – received a generous gift from Friedrich Wilhelm I, King of Prussia, which comprised 52 primarily Roman por- traits. The elector’s enthusiasm for the arts brought purchases to Dresden on a scale that far surpassed those of his predecessors. With regard to sculpture, the key event was the acquisition in 1728 of two outstanding Roman collections formerly belonging to Cardinal Alessandro Albani and Prince Flavio Chigi. Thanks to this purchase, 200 ancient sculptures came to Dresden, not only secur- ing a splendid ensemble of marble sculptures for the elector, but also doing much to bring together a collection that was commensurate with the prestige and am- bition of the House of Wettin. Purchasing negotiations in Rome were entrusted to Baron Raymond Lep- lat, an experienced counsellor and the architect to the king. On October 2, 1728, Leplat concluded the purchase agreement with Flavio Chigi, allowing 164 ancient statues to come to Dresden in exchange for 34,000 scudi romani. Among them are the four statues of a Satyr (p. 56) from the Villa of Domitian at Castel Gan- dolfo, the statue of a Seated Muse (p. 68) from the collection of Cardinal Ippolito d’Este, and the four Heroes (p. 49), which had been excavated in Acqua Santa near Rome in 1672. A few weeks later, in November of 1728, Leplat was able to acquire 32 ancient statues for Dresden through negotiations with Cardinal Albani at a cost of altogether 20,000 scudi. The ensemble included masterworks that still number among the showpieces of the Dresden’s Skulpturensammlung: the Dresden Boy (p. 50), the Dresden Zeus (p. 43), and the statues of the so-called Lemnian Athena (p. 42). In 1699, as well as in 1714 and 1715, prior to his journeys to Rome, Leplat had sojourned in Paris, where he acquired major bronze sculptures for Augustus the Strong. There, he was able to acquire small-format sculptures, such as the Laocoön Group (p. 143) and copies of monumental statues from Versailles by the French sculptors Antoine Coysevox, François Girardon, and Étienne Le Hongre for the electoral collection. Just a few years later, in 1723, Leplat was also able to purchase a reduced copy of Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne in Rome. From the first inventory of sculp- tures, assembled in 1726, we learn that the collection meanwhile comprised 310 objects – among them ‘statues, portrait busts, groups, and other vessels, both ancient and modern, fashioned from all types of marble stone, metals, porphyry, and alabaster’. 2 These were distributed between the ‘picture gallery’, the garden of the Holländisches Palais (today the Japanisches Palais), the Grünes Gewölbe, and the ‘Paraten Schlaff Gemach’ (today the Königliche Paraderäume, or Royal State Apartments).