Homer

On the bookshelves, below the poetry stack, there is a bust that looks as though it could be Homer. Gurlett refers to a bust of Homer that he considers a modern reproduction of the well-known type (Archäologische Zeitung, 1868).

Still harping on the Grand Tour tune, see this portrait of the youthful and rather sheepish Robert Clements (later to become first Earl of Leitrim) in a fruitless attempt to gain gravitas by proximity to the blind bard.



Pompeo Batoni, Italian, 1708-1787
Robert Clements, later 1st Earl of Leitrim (1732-1804)1754

This weird space

Now we stand by old carvéd door
Of solemn Library, and lo!
What serried ranks, from roof to floor,
Stand stately whereso'er we go !
Thousand volumes ranged around,
Therein what million thoughts abound!

Ancient armour graceth well
Yon wall, the west extremity
Of this weird space ; time fails to tell
What spoils of grey Antiquity,
Marble spoils of Grecian art,
And Roman frown in every part
Where vantage shows : Oh ! musing mind !
Muse on ! Th' historic Past defined
In beathing Sculpture's deathless bards,
Warriors and Statesmen, well awards
To thy mute spirit joyful meed
Of awful contemplation ! freed
From Time's tyrannic Present's thrall,
His Past doth wrap thee, all in all!

Ariadne

Clearly recognisable between the Library table and fireplace is a marble copy of the Vatican Ariadne. This is a key piece to understanding the purpose of the library. This room, the most intimate and comfortable in the house, was an inner sanctum. Francis Cook, for all his wealth, was a private and reserved character; he created this room for his own pleasure and self-reliance. Surrounded by four thousand books, this temple of Classical culture gave him personal reassurance as the Man of Arts that he wished to be. The decoration of this room dates from the period before he met J. C. Robinson when Cook transformed himself into a serious art collector. It contains souvenirs of the Grand Tour that he made in his youth (1839-40) when he visited Greece, Turkey, Egypt, Italy, Spain and finally Portugal where he met and married his first wife Emily Lucas. This was the private face of Francis Cook, not for show, a sitting room in a country house, a thousand miles from London.

Ariadne

She was one of the most celebrated pieces of all antiquity: unearthed on the Esquiline Hill in 1512 and placed in the Belvedere Garden of the Vatican. At that time she was thought to represent the dying Cleopatra. The sculpture was a "must see" of all grand tourists and many souvenir pieces were commissioned as souvenirs. More importantly the sculpture has inspired artists with her classic pose, both voluptuous and serene. For example both Titian and Matisse.

Grand Tour

This painting by Batoni, shows the typical Grand Tourist, showing off his newly acquired cultural polish.

Pompeo Girolamo Batoni
Portrait of Count Kirill Grigorjewitsch Razumovsky (1728-1803), full-length, in a scarlet suit, wearing the star, sash and badge of the Order of Saint Andrew and on his breast the Polish Order of the White Eagle, standing within a Sculpture Gallery with the Vatican Ariadne, Apollo Belvedere, Laocoön and the Belvedere Antinous.

Notice that in addition to Ariadne, the Laocoon group is also on show. Both these are to be found at Monserrate.

By 1929 Ariadne had been replaced by a cosy sofa!

Library at Monserrate, 1891

On the left, as the hall is entered, is the library, a room thirty feet long by twenty wide and nineteen feet high, finished in walnut, with a door in high repoussé work, representing Diana in the chase, taken from an Italian palace. The library contains four thousand volumes of standard works on biography, history, poetry, and theology, in Portuguese, French, and Spanish. In the room are a model of the statue of Marcus Aurelius, in Rome ; a model, also, of the Column of Vespasian, in yellow Antico marble ; Cinque Cento bronzes, and Indian arms captured by the Viceroy of India at the taking of Delhi ; antique busts of the Roman emperors ; and swords from Delhi, taken after the capture by Lord Canning. An immense library-table occupies the centre of the room ; and the windows open on the great sloping lawn at the side of the palace.

Door in high repoussé work

This door, after many years in languish, is about to be replaced in its original (Monserrate) location. Would that we knew more of its original location in Italy. The mythological scene that it represents is certainly not one involving the virginal Diana! More about that later.

Four thousand volumes: biography, history, poetry and theology. The surviving shelf labels rather annoyingly read "Misc." for miscellaneous. So perhaps the label that I thought read "Persia" was Poesia after all.

Marcus Aurelius

Column of Vespasian

There are Roman coins from the time of Vespasian showing a figure standing atop a column. At the centre of the library table stands a model column with a figure at its summit. Better known are the remaining three standing columns at the corner of the Temple of Vespasian, could it not be that the model on the desk was in fact a representation of Trajan's column, or indeed that of Marcus Aurelius?

Colonna Trajana by Piranesi, 1750

Cinquecento bronzes

Antique busts of Roman Emperors

Indian Arms

Captured by the Viceroy of India at the taking of Delhi - swords from Delhi, taken after the capture by Lord Canning.

Laocoon

Laocoon
Two small statues of children, arms entwined, once stood in the garden of Monserrate, at the Palace entrance. Perhaps they were fragments of a larger group: The Laocoon.

Nile

The River Nile, ca. 1740–95
Giovanni Volpato (Italian, ca. 1735–1803)


The Vatican Nile, itself a copy of a Hellenistic statue, probably Alexandrian in origin, was discovered in the early sixteenth century in excavations of the shrine to Isis and Serapis near Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome. Pliny the Elder mentions a similar sculpture in ancient Egypt in his Natural History (36.58), explaining that the babies surrounding the river god represent the ideal height of sixteen cubits to which the Nile river rose annually, thereby assuring abundant fertility in Lower Egypt. The Nile's waters, carved as wavy lines and embellished with ibisis, crocodiles, and hippopotami on the Vatican group, are more effectively replaced with wet drapery on the Volpato version due to its smaller size. The Neoclassical flavor of such drapery prefigures its later use by sculptors such as Canova.

The original, a colossal ancient Roman marble sculpture of the Nile, is housed in the Braccio Nuovo at the Vatican.

A cinquecento copy of the Vatican Nile once stood in the stairway at Monserrate. An early item in the Cook Collection, this sculpture once formed part of the Worsley collection. In the same hall there were Flemish Tapestries, Roman Busts, and a large Arabic oil jar.

Southey's Oak

The cork is perhaps the most beautiful of trees : its leaves are small, and have the dusky color of evergreens, but its boughs branch out in the fantastic twistings of the oak, and its bark is of all others the most picturesque ; you have seen deal curl under the carpenter's plane : it grows in such curls ; the wrinkles are of course deep ; one might fancy the cavities the cells of hermit fairies. There is one tree in particular here which a painter might well come out from England to see, large and old ; its trunk and branches are covered with fern -- the yellow, sun-burned fern -- forming so sunny a contrast to the dark foliage ! a wild vine winds up and hangs in festoons from the boughs, its leaves of a bright green, like youth -- and now the purple clusters are ripe.

Rbt. Southey, Letter to Lt. Southey, HMS Bellona,
Cintra, Oct. 7, 1800