Jean-Valentin Morel and the revival of the Lapidary's art: Isabelle Lucas describes the career of the remarkable French goldsmith who pioneered the taste for hard-stone vessels in renaissance taste. The article marks the acquisition by the Indianapolis Museum of Art of one of Morel's masterpieces, made in 1854-55 for the duc de Luynes

Apollo, Jan, 2005 by Isabelle Lucas

The Indianapolis Museum of Art has purchased a splendid bloodstone cup with enamelled gold mounts made by the French goldsmith Jean-Valentin Morel.' Created in 1854-55 for the duc de Luynes, an eminent connoisseur who admired Morel's talents, it represents the culmination of a long-matured skill and ranks as one of Morel's lapidary masterpieces (Fig. 2). a carver of precious stones, a goldsmith and a jeweller: one by one he acquired all the skills needed to revive this branch of the luxury arts, which had been at its height in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Although he never stopped making new contributions to goldsmithing and jewellery, he gradually made work in hardstones one of the dominant features of his craft. His path towards the aesthetic and technical reacquisition of this luxury technique can be retraced from contemporary documents relating to his career and the few pieces known to us at present.

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

It seems likely that he formed the ambition to excel in this difficult genre very early on. Present at every stage of his eventful career, work in hard stones endowed his professional path with an originality unparalleled among his Parisian fellow craftsmen. In that, the example of his father, who initiated him into the stone-cutter's art while he was still very young, was decisive. Valentin Morel (1761-1834) was Piedmontese in origin, and had been trained at the royal rock-crystal works founded by Antoine Caire-Morand at Briangon in 1778. Described as a 'very intelligent pupil', he profited fully from the lessons of Charles Ponsoni and Joseph Fenoti, the two Milanese craftsmen who were his masters. (2) Perhaps it was his ambition to have a career commensurate with his talent that led him to settle in Paris, where he distinguished himself over several decades by his cutting of rock crystal, his speciality. However, it was not a propitious time for the lapidary's art. The task of bringing objets d'art made of jasper, agate, lapis lazuli and rock crystal back into favour would fall to Jean-Valentin, helped by the 'special knowledge that was very useful to him subsequently' passed on to him by his father) Although it is not possible to detect in his work the distant heritage of the Milanese tradition that might link Morel to one of the most active and prestigious centres of production of the renaissance, his background demonstrates a strong and precocious awakening of awareness of the lapidary's art.

After a sound apprenticeship as a goldsmith and jeweller served with Adrien Vachette (1753-1839), a master who had been renowned since the reign of Louis XVI, and an early career full of challenges met with ingenuity, Jean-Valentin's interest in the carving of precious stones became more pronounced from 1828, when he settled in Chateau-Thierry. As he later related, he intended to restore the noble credentials of the lapidary's art: 'I resolutely set about restoring to the profession of lapidary the importance it had acquired in the hands of the old masters; the items it then produced, collected at great expense by our museums, attested to its excellence, which reached its peak towards the end of the sixteenth century. But since that period the art had gradually degenerated to the point of being only a minor craft, producing items of a naive simplicity'. (4) Outside the town he founded a workshop staffed by young peasants whom he trained himself. (5) Always eager to experiment, he also perfected pietra dura mosaic. At the end of this interlude in the provinces, by 1833 his skills extended to not only 'gold snuffboxes, mounts for antique pieces and valuable paintings', but also the execution of 'inlays, mosaics on cups, vases and objets d'art made of jasper, lapis lazuli, agate, etc., as well as mounts for them made of gold and silver'. (6)

In 1834 Jean-Baptiste Fossin (1786-1848) and his son Jules (1808-69) appointed Morel to run the workshop producing objets d'art for their internationally renowned jewellery business. This enabled him to improve his skill still further, thanks to the many commissions they received. Under the influence of what is conventionally called the Romantic movement, a new interest in history and the arts of the past took shape. A new fascination for old objects was evident in the Fossins' cultivated clientele, who asked designers for modern works inspired by them. Morel was commissioned to repair, transform or embellish several early items testifying to the techniques and styles of the past. Once again he took advantage of his great manual dexterity and inventiveness to master forgotten processes such as repousse work on gold, the rediscovery of which proved indispensable to the creation of works that matched the spirit of the time.

He applied this technique for the first time to the mount for a large hard-stone cup that, from his description of it, can probably be identified with a cup made of agate that may be the first hard-stone vase made by him in the renaissance taste (Fig. 1). (7) Its massiveness is surprising in comparison with other known pieces, as is its mount, decorated with broad, curling strapwork, commonly used by nineteenth-century designers and typical of the ornamental vocabulary of the renaissance. Although the tortoises on the foot, perhaps derived from a casket in the Louvre, are so far as is known unique in his work, the winged sirens on the handles will go through noteworthy transformations in his later works. (8) On the other hand, two of Morel's favourite ornamental motifs are already present: the friezes of delicately enamelled foliage and the grotesque masks. The putto about to crush a dragon with a stone (which is missing) is a motif he would reuse in goldsmithing.