Volume 33, Number 7 · April 24, 1986
Bringing Back Algardi
By Hugh Honour
Alessandro Algardi
by Jennifer Montagu
Yale University Press, 488 (two volumes) pp., $95.00 each volume
Last November the London Times ran a front-page headline: '£1 MILLION ALGARDI BUST BROKEN IN MUSEUM FALL.' A workman in the Victoria and Albert Museum had fallen from a ladder, knocking over and shattering a terracotta bust which, according to the museum's regulations, should not have been left in the room while work was in progress. A public scandal, but one of a kind that is passed over quite quickly nowadays in London. It aroused no out-cry comparable with that which regularly greets the sale to an American museum of almost any work of art that could by some stretch of the imagination be called part of the British 'National Heritage'—even an engraving, as the recent sale of prints from Chatsworth showed. The all but total destruction of one of the finest examples of seventeenth-century sculpture in England was taken very lightly: indeed had it not been for its valuation at £1 million sterling it would not have been thought newsworthy for readers to most of whom the name of the sculptor was no more familiar than that of the subject, Cardinal Paolo Emilio Zacchia.
Review, 4161 words
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