The managers of the prestigious Metropolitan Museum (MET) in New York have just accepted a completely new proposal in its great history: to have two of its most beautiful sculptures from the Middle Ages copied identically by a non-American company. These works, whose value is estimated at 1.5 million dollars, were legally purchased in 1907 in the Dordogne, their homeland, before definitively crossing the Atlantic. An operation carried out in complete transparency, but lovers of the artistic heritage of Périgord have always kept in the back of their minds the dream of seeing these works in their historical setting.
Since the 16th century, the two sculptures “Pietà with the Donors” and the “Entombment of Christ” were only visible to visitors who pushed open the solid wooden door of the chapel of the Château de Biron (Dordogne). In 1907, without anyone knowing how he got to this discreet corner of Périgord, John Pierpont Morgan, a wealthy American banker, made an offer to the last Marquis de Biron to buy these two Renaissance jewels. Faced with money problems, the latter accepts. The man nicknamed JP Morgan at the time was also director and main supplier of works of art to the Metropolitan Museum in New York. It is therefore quite natural that he decides to exhibit the two works in the medieval department of the prestigious museum from 1908. They become the centerpieces.
The Périgord Facsimiles Workshop at work
But more than a century later, André Barbé, who runs Sémitour, a company that manages the Château de Biron with the Dordogne department, had the idea of knocking on the door of the MET: “I sent early 2020 a simple email in which I explained that we would really like to find these major works or more exactly their exact copies. Because Semitour has a subsidiary with know-how unique in the world, L’Atelier des Fac-Similés du Périgord, which became famous for its work on the perfect replica of the Lascaux cave, called Lascaux 4, it five years ago.
“American officials have been amazed by what we are able to achieve. If they had doubted for a moment our ability to reproduce these works, they would have refused outright”, continues André Barbé. A delegation therefore made the trip to New York to formalize the project. “The Americans simply made us pay for the very high resolution photos necessary for the work of our artists for a total amount of 24,000 dollars, on February 15th. »
Since that date, painstaking work has begun in the premises of the Atelier des Fac-Similés in Montignac-Lascaux to the delight of the sculptors and painters involved in this adventure: “It’s true that working on volume such as that of a statue it is really exciting. When we sculpted on the walls of Lascaux 4 it was totally different”, explains Allan Bolle, sculptor who has just started his mission on the statue of the Monk Pons de Gontaud of the “Pietà with the donors”.
Two works made between 1504 and 1515
“Reconstructing a masterpiece from the Middle Ages is inevitably something fascinating. The preparation work is done in 3D and with snapshots, but the idea is also to try to think like the Renaissance artists who created these works. Their means were limited and simple and yet they succeeded,” continues the sculptor.
In fact, no one really knows who is the author of these two works, probably produced between 1504 and 1515 in Biron, but one thing is certain: the result is “extraordinary”, as Aurélia Teixeira, visual artist, confides. “All the difficulty for us is to reconstruct the smallest millimeter of paint but also the graffiti after the creation of the sculptures but which are totally part of them. On average, I manage to paint about five millimeters a day, sometimes ten… I still have a lot of work to do,” she smiles, placing the black tip of her brush on the feet of Armand de Gontaud, brother of Pons and former bishop of Sarlat whose legend says that he would have died during a fight because, borrowing the hat with the white plume of Henri IV, the enemy would have confused him with the king, smashing his head with a cannonball of cannon.
As for the two sculptures, they should be completed by the end of the year, but a delegation from the Metropolitan Museum of New York is expected in the Dordogne in the coming weeks to see the progress of this unique project, the result of a beautiful Franco-American cooperation.
2023-04-23 07:15:00
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