Merseyside, UK - Last week, the culture minister John Penrose said that the listed building consent for the removal, repairs and replacement of 102 pieces of antique marble sculpture located in a garden temple and Pantheon at Ince Blundell Hall, now a care home run by the Augustinian Sisters, is not a matter for central government but rests with Sefton Council. English Heritage recommended that the Sisters' application be granted in order to reduce the risk of theft and vandalism, and EH agreed that as a result of its removal a private sale might occur.
English Heritage said: "The nuns are concerned about the condition of, and threats to, the antique statuary and therefore want it removed. Our advice is to remove it for conservation and replaced it with high quality replicas. It would be harmful to the collection as a whole if items were sold and dispersed, so we advise that the antiquities should not be removed for a year so that there is an opportunity for funds to be raised to allow public acquisition. This period could also be used to find out if there are any practical ways of retaining the sculpture at Ince Blundell safely and securely." Henry Owen-John, planning director for English Heritage in the North West conceded that if the money raised did not equal the market value of the antique marbles, worth tens of millions of pounds according to the Telegraph, they could be sold to private collectors.
The Grade II listed hall was home to 600 antique and Roman marble busts and statues collected by Henry Blundell, a wealthy Georgian collector, from Richard Wilson, Canova, Gavin Hamilton, Anton Raphael Meng and, via Jenkins in Naples a seated philosopher and eighty pieces from the Villa Mattei, and later via Father John Thorpe in Rome a group from the Villa Borrioni probably in 1777, copies by Giuseppi Angelini, Giovanni Volpato and Carlo Albacini, a reduced version of Trajan's Column by Bartolomeo Cavaceppi, and auction lots in 1800 from Lord Cawdor and 1801 from Lord Bessborough. All but 100 sculptures from his collection were removed from Ince Blundell Hall in 1959 are now in the National Museum of Liverpool.
Charles Sebag-Montefiore of the Society of Dilettanti wrote to the Daily Telegraph concerned that the collection would be sold to the highest bidder following an application to the local council for their listed building status to be removed. He said the collection was one of only three surviving from the 18th century and that its sale would create a worrying precedent for listed antique marble statuary. He was not aware of any attempts to establish the cost of conservation in situ or to explore other ways of keeping them in their original setting.
He said: "What do English Heritage think they are doing? They are meant to be protecting heritage not destroying it. What is the point of the listing system if it can be brushed aside so easily?"
According to the Daily Telegraph Mr Owen-John urged interested parties such as the Society of Dilettanti to approach the Sisters directly if they believed they could fund the restoration of the sculptures whilst also improving security at the hall or alternatively raise enough money to ensure they go into public ownership.
A spokesperson for the nuns said: "The reports are full of inaccuracies and untruths and there is no immediate intention to sell the marbles."
A comment left on the Art Newspaper by G Davies of Edinburgh reads:
My catalogue of about 10 per cent of the items in the Ince Blundell collection (the ash chests and some other Roman funerary reliefs), published in 2007, included 8 ash chests and lids which are still embedded in the interior walls of the Garden Temple. In researching this material I spent some time at the Hall, and I can quite understand the nuns' quandary. Keeping these sculptures in their present location is not just a constant worry for them - it is not necessarily the best thing for the sculptures, especially those in the fabric of the exterior of the buildings. My concern is not so much that they should stay where they are (after all, the majority are now in store in Liverpool), but that the collection should stay together. The collection is virtually intact (I know of only a few pieces which have been lost): as such it is a valuable example of such late 18th century collections. If they are sold, I hope that they will not lose their Ince identity, and will not be too widely dispersed.
Also in the Art Newspaper Tim Knox, director of the Soane Museum, asked: "What is to stop every church or country house from saying that their monuments are in danger of being vandalised and therefore, in the interests of preservation, should be removed and sold? None of us wants to be horrid to the nuns, but their objectives are not in line with running a Grade II-listed building."
John Harris, architectural historian, said: "We are concerned because in effect, English Heritage is providing a precedent for anyone with historical fixtures in their house to apply to have them removed and sold. This is one of the most disgraceful moves by English Heritage in memory and it's been done entirely in ignorance." He also said that the Blundell heirs have always believed that Weld's donation included the entire collection, which means the sculptures could belong to the National Museum of Liverpool.
Daily Telegraph: Eminent art enthusiasts demand protection of Roman marble
Crosby Herald: Augustinian nuns react angrily to claims Ince Blundell Hall could lose its marbles
Story Type: News
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