ITALIAN COLLECTION, 19th CENTURY, AFTER PIETRO TACCA (1577- 1640) Captives in chains Pair of bronzes with brown and gilded patinas On wooden bases painted in imitation of marble and porphyry Pair of bronze sculptures with brown and gilded patina, 19th century Italian school, after Pietro Tacca HEIGHT 44 CM - H. 17,3 IN. Reference work Pietro Tacca, Monument to Ferdinand Medici, 1620-1623, Piazzetta della Darsena, Livorno Auguste Bartholdi (1834-1904) Born in Colmar, where his family had settled in the seventeenth century, Auguste Bartholdi trained in Ary Scheffer's studio. Scheffer detected in him a definite talent for sculpture, which he then studied with Jean-François Soitoux. After a highly instructive trip to the Orient in the company of the painter Jean-Léon Gérôme in the 1850s, Bartholdi returned to France and took part in a number of public competitions. He was particularly sought after by his home town, for which he erected a monument to General Rapp in 1854. In 1857, the town of Colmar commissioned him to erect a monument in honour of Admiral Armand Joseph Bruat, a hero of the French Navy and the Crimean War who had died two years earlier. While having to comply with the wishes of the mayor of Colmar to erect the municipality's very first continuous fountain, the sculptor conceived an ambitious initial project for a monument in five parts: the figure of the victorious admiral is standing at his command post on the deck of the ship, holding a telescope and a map with an anchor at his feet. The statue overlooks a circular basin decorated with the city's four coats of arms framed by a sea monster, and divided into four sections on which allegorical figures inspired by Antiquity recline. The water is to flow through four antique trireme prows. The project was immediately approved by the town council, but the lack of financial prospects led to objections and delays in its construction. As the project had to be simplified, Bartholdi made a number of changes, in particular the figures in the basin, which symbolised the four continents the Admiral had travelled through in his capacity as a servant of France. Again for reasons of cost, in 1861 the Committee asked Bartholdi to abandon these allegorical figures, which were eventually not removed thanks to a fortunate anonymous donation (actually from his mother). In 1863, Bartholdi exhibited the model at the Salon. The monument was finally erected in bronze for the statue of Bruat and in Vosges sandstone for the elements of the pool and inaugurated on 21 August 1864. Unfortunately, the monument in its original state is no longer known, as it was partially destroyed on 30 August 1940 by the German occupying forces. However, the heads of the Continents were salvaged and are now housed in the Bartholdi Museum in Colmar. In 1958, the monument was rebuilt around the bronze statue of Bruat, the only original element preserved, on a fountain surrounded by new stone allegories created by the sculptor Gérard Choain and the architect Michel Porte. These two heads in patinated plaster are the preparatory and final versions of the heads of Africa and America, which went through a series of twists and turns from conception to preservation. These two works are rare testimonies to the artist's creative process, and are a welcome addition to the meagre corpus of works, along with the preparatory model in patinated plaster and the sandstone heads of the Continents preserved at the Musée Bartholdi in Colmar, relating to the design of this monument, which is considered a milestone in the artist's career. As Robert Belot, a specialist on the artist, points out, Bartholdi not only conceived this monument as a tribute to a local hero, but also his first work "with a philosophical resonance and global scope", conveying in it the message, to anyone who would see it, of his political commitment to the fight against slavery, his support for abolitionist thinking and universalist values.