Introduction
Figs 1 and 2: Marochetti, British Cavalry Division.
(Figs 1 and 2) The c.1857 concave white marble mural monument by Royal favourite and Franco-Italian revolutionary-émigré sculptor Carlo Marochetti (14 January 1805 – 28 December 1867) “IN MEMORY OF THE / OFFICERS[,] NON COMMISSIONED OFFICERS[,] AND PRIVATES / OF THE CAVALRY DIVISION / OF THE BRITISH ARMY / WHO FELL IN ACTION OR DIED OF WOUNDS OR DISEASE / DURING THE WAR WITH RUSSIA / IN THE YEARS / 1854. 1855. 1856.” is set into the wall of the most westerly, concave bay of the north aisle of the Cathedral floor.
“Italian by extraction, French by birth, and English by adoption”, the cosmopolitan sculptor’s monument was described, in 2004, by Roger Bowdler and Ann Saunders, as a “closely studied relief of diverse uniforms, like a cigarette card rendered in marble” (285). The relief was located in the bay immediately adjacent to the Chapel of St Dunstan, in Marochetti’s time still the Morning Chapel (The Times 20 January 1860). The mural was ultimately positioned behind Thomas Brock’s subsequent c.1896 – 1902 sleepy effigy of the relatedly continental and cosmopolitan painter, sculptor, and Royal Academy president Frederic Leighton. The painter seems to be dreaming of Marochetti’s Crimean cavalrymen behind him, just as his 1880 Uffizi self-portrait is similarly backed by a line of Parthenon horsemen (Figs 3 and 4).
Figs 3 and 4: Brock, Leighton; Leighton, Self-portrait (Public Domain, via Wikipedia).
On the left side of the bay, meanwhile, is F.W. Pomeroy’s c.1905 mural monument to Archbishop Frederick Temple, who seems to have turned away from Marochetti’s cavalrymen and turned to the east-end altar, perhaps to pray for them (Fig. 5).
Fig. 5: Pomeroy, Temple.
The contrast of Marochetti’s white and Pomeroy’s and Brock’s black bronze memorials additionally provides a vertical parallel to Wren’s original chequerboard marble floor. The right-hand panel in the bay remains blank (Fig. 6).
Fig. 6: Pomeroy, Temple; Brock, Leighton; Marochetti, Cavalry.
Marochetti at St Paul’s Cathedral
Fig. 7: Marochetti, Cavalry.
(Fig. 7) The Cavalry memorial was the penultimate of five Cathedral commissions for Marochetti, the majority connected with the Crimea. The sculptor’s first commission was a marble mural monument to Anglo-Burmese war veteran Granville Gower Loch (1853), of which the truculent combat imagery is a far remove from the mournful stillness of the Cavalry memorial (Fig. 8).
Fig 8: Marochetti, Loch.
Marochetti’s second commission, in the same marble-mural, military reportage mode, was to Crimean veteran Arthur Wellesley Torrens (1855), with a patinated bronze variant fashioned for the Royal Chelsea Hospital in London, the retirement home for the Chelsea Pensioners (Figs 9 and 10).
Figs 9 and 10: Marochetti, Torrens (The Royal Hospital Chelsea, via ArtUK, CC BY–NC 4.0).
Like the Torrens and the Cavalry monuments, Marochetti’s third Cathedral commission was also connected to the Crimean war: an 1856 marble mural memorial to the Coldstream Guards who perished in the region (Figs 11 and 12).
Figs 11 and 12: Marochetti, Coldstream Guards; Illustrated London News (23 August 1856.
© Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evan).
The monument anticipates Marochetti’s final Cathedral commission, the c.1858 – 1867 memorial to British Prime Minister and eminent diplomat brothers William and Frederick Melbourne with its similarly central deathly portal, flanked by two inwardly leaning mourning figures (Figs 13 and 14).
Figs 13 and 14: Marochetti, Coldstream Guards, Melbournes.
Marochetti would also later employ the same formula for his 1858 memorial to Lieutenant-Colonel James Cowell for Llanelli, in Carmarthen, Wales, a Coldstream Guard who also died at Inkermann (Fig. 15).
Fig. 15: Marochetti, Cowell.
Marochetti’s three Cathedral Crimean memorials were not, however, his most famous monument to Crimean veterans. Most famous was his Crimean War Memorial for the British War Cemetery in Scutari, Turkey (c.1856), at which he was at work in the same period as he was fashioning the Cavalry monument. This again employed related angelic iconography to the Melbourne memorial, which followed it in Marochetti’s studio (Figs 16 and 17).
Figs 16 and 17: Marochetti, Scutari (Illustrated London News, 17 May 1856. © Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans); Crimean War (Scutari) Memorial, the English Cemetery, Haidar Pasha, Turkey (Müge Arseven, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0, via Victorian Web).
According to the Times of 16 April 1856, the Scutari memorial would “always occupy a foremost place in the memorials of the war just ended”, and certainly it reminds Marochetti’s most famous Crimean commission, up to the present day.
Marochetti would again re-employ this angelic iconography in his Cawnpore Memorial in India, following the brutal events of 1857 – 1858 across the subcontinent. The Angel of Resurrection memorial (1862 – 1865), also known as the Angel of Pity monument (Illustrated London News, 31 October 1874), is now at All Souls’ Memorial Church. Kanpur (formerly Cawnpore). The memorial commemorated the massacre of British women and children on 5 July 1857at the Bibighar (or women’s house). Their bodies were thrown down a well, over which the monument originally stood (Figs 18 and 19).
Figs 18 and 19: Anon. ‘The Angel of Pity’ in the Memorial Garden, Cawnpore, 1867, NAM.1957-04-30-19 (© National Army Museum, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0); Marochetti, Cawnpore Memorial (Illustrated London News, 31 October 1874. © Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans).
Following early discussions with Anglo–Irish sculptor John Henry Foley and Pre–Raphaelite sculptor Thomas Woolner, Marochetti was ultimately awarded the commission by Indian Viceroy Stratford (so–called ‘Clemency’) Canning and his wife Charlotte, who funded it at their own expense (Illustrated London News, 31 October 1874).
The Cawnpore Memorial comprised an angel holding two palm branches under a simple cross, on a stepped pedestal with a lotus pattern base, within a gothic cloister, designed by Colonel Yule of the Royal Engineers, with gates fashioned from gun metal captured from the Insurgents.
The most visited monument in nineteenth–century British India, Marochetti’s more lurid original designs involved a Britannia and the actual scene of murder at the well, but this was abandoned on the advice of the Cannings, who “very sensitively intervened, and decried any sculpture which would have offended Indians in the future” (Barnes and Steggles, 45 – 47, 261).
The monument nevertheless helped make Marochetti’s mid–century reputation. Indeed, so closely was Marochetti’s name associated with India that George Augustus Sala asked, “Where Marochetti?” at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition in London of 1886, when the sculptor’s works did not appear (Illustrated London News, 8 May 1886).
Marochetti and the Wellington Controversy
Fig. 20: Marochetti, Cavalry.
(Fig. 20) As Marochetti was working on the Cavalry memorial, he was also famously involved in the controversy surrounding the Cathedral monument to the Duke of Wellington, ultimately awarded to Alfred Stevens in 1857, and completed, in 1912, by John Tweed (Fig. 21).
Fig. 21: Stevens and Tweed, Wellington.
Following overtures ahead of the competition, to four sculptors: Marochetti, Foley, John Gibson, and E.H. Baily, Marochetti declined an open competition and presumed, erroneously as it turned out, that the commission would be his anyway.
Trying to persuade the committee, or force its hand, the sculptor had begun prominently displaying parts of his supposedly anonymous design to the public and press. Gibson, meanwhile, had refused to take part, and only Baily and Foley accepted the invitation; Foley later withdrew in 1855 after a three–year delay on the part of the committee. The committee, meanwhile, rejected Baily and Marochetti’s designs in May 1855, even though both offered to make revisions.
Nevertheless, in 1856, a similarly frustrated F.W. Woodington co–signed an open letter, expressing outrage at the apparently preferential treatment being given to “foreign artists” in the competition, namely Marochetti, even while professing that the signatories’ views did not amount to “an illiberal jealousy of the foreigner”, and that “art [was] a universal language” (Physick, 29–30).
The letter, to Benjamin Hall, the Competition’s government spokesman, was published in the Daily News on 31 May 1856, and co–signed by a number of Marochetti’s St Paul’s peers, including Baily, William Behnes, Patrick Macdowell, Matthew Noble, and William Calder Marshall (Read, 84).
The letter also singled out, “in our Metropolitan Cathedral”, the “large puerilities and distressing allegories which deface the walls” (Physick, 30); and the alleged poor treatment, by the state, of John Flaxman and Thomas Banks, even though Banks has two Cathedral monuments and Flaxman four, all prominently on view on the Cathedral floor.
Partly as a result, in September 1856, a new Wellington competition, for an explicitly sepulchral monument, was announced, with the committee signalling that it would receive designs from artists from all countries. These were required to submit ¼ scale models of their intended monuments. The final work was to be fashioned from marble, stone, bronze, granite, or any of the four materials in combination, coloured marbles requiring tinting in the model.
The committee also specified that the winning design would “essentially differ” from “all of the other monuments now in the Cathedral”; then Dean Henry Hart Milman’s assertive mid–Victorian, polychromatic transformation of the Cathedral had begun (Physick, 41). Milman himself was originally commemorated on the Cathedral floor in a c.1872 – 1876 mixed media tomb effigy by F.J. Williamson, subsequently relocated to the Crypt (Fig. 22).
Fig. 22: Williamson, Milman.
Marochetti, however, then caused widespread offence when his leaked design for the memorial appeared in The Times, who reported its display in Wellington’s own former Apsley House, causing him to withdraw, his gambit having failed, although the press continued to suggest that he would ultimately win, the judges in his pocket.
Marochetti’s well–publicised model was, of course, neither quarter size nor anonymous, two competition stipulations (Fig. 23).
Fig 23: Marochetti, Wellington Monument (Illustrated London News, 25 June 1859. © Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans).
Nevertheless, in 1856, the Ecclesiologist reported that “public attention” had “‘til lately been kept on the rack by the pretensions of Baron Marochetti to inflict” on St Paul’s a “monument of monstrous dimensions, in which bad taste promised to flaunt in the most gigantic proportions”; a proposed monument that was “obnoxious to every charge of irreverence and far-fetched allegory of which the most outré production of the 18th century can be guilty” (358).
The Illustrated London News, meanwhile, described Marochetti’s envisioned Wellington memorial as an “abomination, styled the Angel of Victory” (22 December 1860), who in its Apsley House location, turned its back on Wyatt’s Wellington and turned its nose up at Westmacott’s Achilles (April 30 1859) (Fig. 24).
Fig. 24: Marochetti, Melbournes.
If the Lloyd’s report of 31 May 1857 is anything to go by, Marochetti’s planned memorial to Wellington was very much in the idiom of his Melbourne monument. It similarly comprised an “imitative door of bronze” to be “placed between two of the interior pilasters”, and on whose steps was to be sat the “gigantic figure of Victory, with outspread wings, supposed to be the constant companion of the hero, even to the tomb” that we have encountered in the grounds of Apsley House.
Above the door was to stand an “equestrian figure of the duke, while on pedestals on each side of the steps” would be “seated two figures symbolising civil and military honour”, perhaps explaining the trumpet and sword in the Melbourne monument respectively (Physick, 37) (Figs 25 and 26).
Figs 25 and 26: Marochetti, Melbournes.
The Times, meanwhile, believed that Marochetti’s Wellington would “be raised in St Paul’s”, and praised the way its “outspread” wings were “restlessly fluttering, ready to fly away”, having taken a “last look at the shut door of the sepulcher, half in sorrow for the departed hero half in doubt as to whom his sword, which she grasps in her left hand, shall next be given” (April 16 1856, 26 May 1857) (Fig. 27).
Fig 27: Marochetti, Wellington Monument (Illustrated London News, 25 June 1859.
© Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans).
Marochetti’s model for the Wellington monument remained at Apsley House until at least 1859, when the Art Journal commented that its “prolonged abiding” seemed to be “intended as a persistent chastisement of public taste”, causing them to worry that it would be “ultimately accepted” after all, over Stevens’s winning design (Physick, 54).
Despite Marochetti’s best efforts, the Melbourne memorial would be his last Cathedral commission. In the event, he did not even receive one of the commemoration prizes for the Wellington. These took the form of three Biblical panels each, emblematising Wellington’s virtues for the Duke’s chapel, awarded to Woodington and Calder Marshall: in Calder Marshall’s case, Righteousness and Peace Hath Kissed Each Other, The Book of Job, and The Gospel of Matthew; and, in Woodington’s, The Gospel of St Luke, Genesis, and Psalm 140 (Figs 28 – 35).
Figs 28 and 29: Woodington, Genesis.
Figs 30 and 31: Woodington, Gospel of St Luke; Psalm 140.
Figs 32 and 33: Calder Marshall, Righteousness and Peace Hath Kissed Each Other.
Figs 34 and 35: Calder Marshall, The Gospel of Matthew; The Book of Job.
Three of Marochetti’s St Paul’s commissions – the Cavalry, Torrens, and Melbourne memorials – are, however, located in adjacent bays on the North Side of the Cathedral floor, making it something of a Marochetti wing in the Cathedral: a grouping which would have been even more impressive had the sculptor won the prestigious, and now adjacent Wellington commission as well.