The Etro Collection Terracottas Finally Brought Together in a Reference Book

This collection, one of the most important in Italy, has been published for the first time. A further step in recognizing a too little-known genre.

Etro: these four letters, sounding like an acronym, shine out in the windows of Italy’s major shopping streets. Gerolamo Etro is well-known for the fashion house he founded in 1968 and his work as a designer. But less so for the passion he nurtures with his wife Roberta, a former Old Masters gallery owner. Though their discretion is matched only by the quality of the works they have acquired over the decades, they are nonetheless highly prominent in Italy as husband-and-wife collectors, firstly of Italian masters of modern and contemporary art (including Giorgio Morandi, Giorgio De Chirico, Antonio Donghi and Alberto Burri), then of Old Masters, particularly Baroque sculpture. Their collection of 17^th and 18^th-century Italian bronzes and marbles would be the pride of many major museums today. The same is true of their terracotta collection. Over the past 30 years, the Etros have combed through the catalogs of European auction houses, visited galleries in Paris, London and New York, and paced the aisles of the Biennial of Antiques in Florence and TEFAF in Maastricht. The result of these peregrinations is one of the most important private collections of terracotta, with 70-odd masterpieces ranging from the Renaissance to the 20^th century, from Alessandro Vittoria to Arturo Martini. A few non-Italian artists feature prominently — like the Frenchman Jean-Jacques Caffieri and the Flemish artists Peter Anton von Verschaffelt and Josse le Court — but their quest for the finest pieces has focused on the Italian Baroque. Sculptors from all the transalpine schools — Rome, Venice, Genoa, Florence and Naples — are represented, like Antonio Raggi, Filippo Parodi, Massimiliano Soldani Benz and Giuseppe Sanmartinos. With allegories, portraits, reliefs, modellos, sketches and finished works designed for the market, every theme and typology found in terracotta features in this collection, now inventoried for the first time.

Terracottas: Works in Their Own Right

A rich catalog produced by a team under Andrea Bacchi has just been published. “This collection of terracottas rivals those of the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg or the Ca’ d’Oro in Venice,” says the art historian and Italian Baroque specialist. “We need only mention pieces like Angelo de Rossi’s Saint John the Baptist, signed and dated, which is exceptionally rare for the period, or the portraits of Giulia Albani by Camillo Rusconi, and of Giovan Luca Durazzo by Filippo Parodi. Although the core of the collection consists of sculptures from the 17^th and 18^th centuries, one of its particularities is its huge chronological scope, ranging from the 15^th century to 1932, with Arturo Martini’s Allegory of Greek Tragedy. Pieces by the most illustrious artists rub shoulders with others still awaiting attribution. Like all true collectors, the Etro couple are not looking simply for a name, but above all for quality.” One does not exclude the other. Coincidentally, the publication of the catalog follows a very recent acquisition, Latona Transforming the Peasants of Lycia into Frogs, a relief created in around 1675-1680 by Giuseppe Mazzuoli. A symbolic work, since it belonged to Flavio Chigi, nephew of Pope Alexander VII, who was one of the first collectors of terracotta. At the end of the 17^th century, these sculptures began to attract increasing interest from aesthetes. They were no longer only preparatory sketches for larger works in bronze or marble, or models used by artists to present their projects to patrons. Firing techniques, which were haphazard until the 18^th century, were by now increasingly well-mastered. These objects, until then found in studio contents, were now sought after by collectors for their cabinets of curiosities, or for educational purposes, as the Venetian Academy did to show young sculptors the great Roman models. “However, little attention was paid to them until the 20^th century,” says expert Alexandre Lacroix. But true sculpture enthusiasts and collectors are very drawn to terracottas. They are to sculpture what drawing is to painting. Expressed by artists’ hands with no intermediaries like the brush or burin, they immerse us in their creative process and the very heart of their work. It can be very moving to sometimes spot their fingerprints, and fascinating to see early versions of an artist’s creative impulse, with their trials, errors and explorations. The terracotta models used by 17^th-century French sculptors, for example, have almost all disappeared. They were very fragile, and many were destroyed. They constitute a very dynamic niche market, with rare pieces fetching high prices when they come up for sale.” On June 18, 2023, the Louvre preempted a sculpture by François Anguier for €2.5 M at a sale staged by Osenat.

Le Terre cotte. Collezione G&R Etro: A Landmark Publication

“Until the end of the 19^th century, very little terracotta was collected,” says Andrea Bacchi. “Interest revived in the 20^th century, with the rediscovery of Baroque art in the 1930s-1940s, and even more strongly in the 1970s and1980s. Baroque Italy was the epicenter of terracotta. All the artists of the time worked in or were inspired by it. In the Germanic world and in the Middle Ages, preparatory sketches were most often made in wood, while sculptors in Florence began to use terracotta in the 15^th century. Since the early 2000s, prestigious museums have devoted major exhibitions to terracotta works.” Like the Louvre in 2003-2004 with “The Creative Spirit From Pigalle to Canova. European Terracottas, 1740-1840”: a major step towards getting them known and appreciated by the general public. In 2013, the Metropolitan Museum of Art inaugurated “Bernini. Sculpting in Clay”, bringing together for the first time some 50 sketches and models of the sculptures that made Bernini famous, from the fountains in the Piazza Navona to the angels on the Ponte San Angelo in Rome. More recently, in 2023-2024, the National Gallery in Washington and the Art Institute of Chicago presented “Canova. Sketching in Clay”, the first exhibition in over 50 years devoted to terracotta sketches from the plaster casts in the collection of the Canova Museum in Possagno: a tour designed to offer a revealing glimpse into the creative and technical process of the neoclassical sculptural genius. “The publication of the Etro Collection catalog will be a milestone,” says Andrea Bacchi. “It will become an indispensable tool for art lovers and professionals in the terracotta market.” Leafing through it, one can only agree with what the collector and engraver Jean-Pierre Mariette wrote in 1750: “The excellence of terracotta models cannot be overstated. A fine, enlightened eye discovers in them all the master’s spirit; that creative spirit, that dazzling, all-divine fire that emanates from the soul, and which is so very nearly extinguished and destroyed by the instant of reflection”.

Worth Reading
Edited by Andrea Bacchi
Le Terre cotte. Collezione G&R Etro
Rome, Officina Libraria, 2024
416 pages, 425 illustrations, €75