Carlo Marochetti: Sculpture in the Service of Constitutional Monarchies by Dr Philip Ward-Jackson

The three main theatres in which Marochetti flourished were the July Monarchy in France, the liberal rule of the Savoy Carignano dynasty in Piedmont before the achievement of Italian Unification, and Victorian England. It will be argued that his form of romanticism tempered by realism was a response to, as well as the appropriate expression of, the prevailing political realities in these three places. Whilst, with his childhood background in Imperial France, whose self-appointed mission was to extend to a wider world the values of the French Revolution, several of Marochetti’s projects, all of which ultimately failed, were nostalgic commemorations of Napoleonic glories, and even of American republicanism, his chief artistic legacy will remain his affirmations, through sculpture, of the values of the constitutional monarchies he served.

Philip Ward-Jackson worked in the Conway Library of the Courtauld Institute, before his retirement in 2004. His PhD thesis (1970) was on J.-K. Huysmans and the Visual Arts, but in the Conway he was responsible for photographic records of sculpture (4th century BC to the present) and architecture and design (1800 to the present). Before the Courtauld, he had studied at St Martin’s School of Art, and still draws and paints. In the course of his career he developed photographic skills, which are now largely redundant in the digital age, but whose results can still be seen online (The Courtauld’s Art and Architecture website). He has contributed two volumes, Public Sculpture of the City of London (2003) and Public Sculpture of Historic Westminster (2011) to the PMSA (now the PSSA)’s National Recording Project, and has written many articles chiefly on sculptors from mainland Europe working in nineteenth century Britain.