The story of is certainly particular and very evocative fourteen statues, two meters high, which were part of the Siena Cathedral and were placed inside the Cathedral and which are now found in a museum in London, the Brompton Oratory. There was a “time hole”, a step was missing in the reconstruction of this story, namely how these works of art had actually left Siena and Italy, had also crossed the Channel and had arrived as far as the city of London.
These are fourteen baroque statues depicting the Redeemer, the Madonna and the twelve apostles, wonderful works of art created by the artist Giuseppe Mazzuoli of Cortona in the seventeenth century. In reality only twelve of the fourteen statues are preserved in London today. Two, however, were lost and there is no longer any news of them. Angelo Acampora, a historian from Castellamare di Stabia, while carrying out some of his research, came across news relating to this very story. The historian has in fact found a late nineteenth-century magazine with a particular and evocative name: Amaranzuntifass. In this magazine was published, precisely in April 1894, the announcement of a sculptor named Cesare Corsiborn in Siena in 1832 and who then died in Florence in 1907.
This is a sales announcement: Corsi was in fact selling fourteen marble statues. These were precisely the fourteen statues that were previously positioned inside the Cathedral. This is the published announcement: “To art lovers. 14 statues are for sale which have adorned the Cathedral of Siena for two centuries. They are in full relief, made of Carrara statuary marble, two meters high, with a marble shelf 83 meters high centimeters, 81 long. They are works by Mazzuoli of Cortona and bear the character of Bernini. For negotiations, contact the owner Mr. Cesare Corsi, sculptor, Via dei Pinti, 60, Florence”.
Therefore Cesare Corsi had come into possession of these statues and had decided to sell them to the highest bidder. At the moment, no subsequent sales documents for Mazzuoli’s statues are known, but at this point it is easy to imagine that the negotiation was initiated and then carried out and concluded with the London museum, where the works of art are still found today. Not all, however, because two of them were lost.
The “case” was also opened thanks to one publication dedicated to the historical photographic archive of the Sienese Superintendency entitled “Black and White Memoirs”: in the text, in fact, the images of the baroque statues that had disappeared from the Siena Cathedral at the end of the 19th century had been published. In the volume, which is written by Fabio Torchio and is completed by an essay by Cinzia Nanni, you can see a collection of ancient plates and nineteenth-twentieth century photographs. AND you can actually see the fourteen baroque statues that adorned the Sienese Cathedral and which had “disappeared” since the second half of the nineteenth century. Now a further step in the story, with the discovery of the announcement of the sale of the wonderful works of art published by the sculptor Cesare Corsi.
