Meissen red stoneware head of Vitellius
date: label: date made
content: 1708-1720
name: label: maker
content: Meissen Manufactory
notes: label: Description
content: MARKS: None.
label: Description
content: PURCHASED FROM: Hans E. Backer, London, England, 1947.
label: Description
content: This miniature portrait head is from the Smithsonian’s Hans Syz Collection of Meissen Porcelain. Dr. Syz (1894-1991) began his collection in the early years of World War II, when he purchased eighteenth-century Meissen table wares from the Art Exchange run by the New York collector and dealer Adolf Beckhardt (1889-1962). Dr. Syz, a Swiss immigrant to the United States, collected Meissen porcelain while engaged in a professional career in psychiatry and the research of human behavior. He believed that cultural artifacts have an important role to play in enhancing our awareness and understanding of human creativity and its communication among peoples. His collection grew to represent this conviction.
label: Description
content: The invention of Meissen porcelain, declared over three hundred years ago early in 1709, was a collective achievement that represents an early modern precursor to industrial chemistry and materials science. The porcelains we see in our museum collections, made in the small town of Meissen in Germany, were the result of an intense period of empirical research. Generally associated with artistic achievement of a high order, Meissen porcelain was also a technological achievement in the development of inorganic, non-metallic materials.
label: Description
content: This portrait head of Vitellius was made in red stoneware, a very hard and dense type of ceramic similar in appearance to the Chinese Yixing ceramics which inspired their imitation at Meissen. This object, however, refers to European sculptural representation in the classical style. The Emperor Vitellius ruled the Roman Empire for less than a year and was assassinated in the Forum in Rome in AD 69. He was the last of the undistinguished Four Emperors, all of whom met violent deaths in the year 68 to 69 AD. Vitellius was a man of arbitrary cruelty and prodigious gluttony. It is now thought that the portrait represents a high official in the Emperor Hadrian’s court.
label: Description
content: Red stoneware, enriched with iron oxides, preceded porcelain in the Dresden laboratory where physicist, mathematician, and philosopher, Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus (1651-1708) and alchemist Johann Friedrich Böttger (1682-1719) experimented with raw materials fused by solar energy amplified through a burning glass. Success in red stoneware was an important step towards development of porcelain.
label: Description
content: Paul Heermann (1673-1732) was probably the Dresden sculptor who modeled this piece. He was a notable artist who worked in ivory and marble, but also completed models for the Meissen manufactory in the very early years of 1708-1710. He was the nephew of Johann Georg Heermann, and both men worked in the manner of the baroque sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680).
label: Description
content: On the portrait bust of Vitellius see http://www.unipd.it/vallisneri/en/antiquity/13.html)
label: Description
content: Hans Syz, J. Jefferson Miller II, Rainer Rückert, 1979, Catalogue of the Hans Syz Collection: Meissen Porcelain and Hausmalerei, pp. 34-35.
place: label: place made
content: Germany: Saxony, Meissen
setName: label: See more items in
content: Home and Community Life: Ceramics and Glass
label: See more items in
content: The Hans C. Syz Collection
label: See more items in
content: Art
label: See more items in
content: Domestic Furnishings
creditLine: label: Credit Line
content: Hans C. Syz Collection
dataSource: label: Data Source
content: National Museum of American History
identifier: label: ID Number
content: CE.75.184
label: catalog number
content: 75.184
label: collector/donor number
content: 678
label: accession number
content: 319073
objectType: label: Object Name
content: bust
physicalDescription: label: Physical Description
content: monochrome, rust (overall surface decoration color name)
label: Physical Description
content: ceramic, stoneware, refined (overall material)
label: Measurements
content: overall: 4 in; 10.16 cm