Émile Gilliéron: Difference between revisions

Émile Gilliéron père
Photographed c. 1915
Born	Louis Émile Emmanuel Gilliéron (1850-10-24)October 24, 1850 Villeneuve, Switzerland
Died	October 13, 1924(1924-10-13) (aged 73) Athens, Greece
Education	Kunstakademie, Munich École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris
Known for	Archaeological reconstructions, especially of frescoes from Knossos and Tiryns
Spouse	Joséphine Zoecchi ​ (m. 1884)​
Children	Émile Gilliéron fils
Patron(s)	German Archaeological Institute at Athens Heinrich Schliemann Arthur Evans

Louis Émile Emmanuel Gilliéron (1850–1924), often known as Émile Gilliéron père to distinguish him from his son, was a Swiss artist and archaeological draughtsman best known for his reconstructions of Mycenaean and Minoan artefacts from the Bronze Age. From 1877 until his death, he worked with archaeologists such as Heinrich Schliemann, Arthur Evans and Georg Karo, drawing and restoring ancient objects from sites such as the Acropolis of Athens, Mycenae, Tiryns and Knossos. Well-known discoveries reconstructed by Gilliéron include the "Harvester Vase", the "Priest-King Fresco" and the "Bull-Leaping Fresco".

From 1894, Gilliéron maintained a business producing replicas of archaeological finds, particularly metal vessels, which were sold to museums and collectors across Europe and North America. This enterprise grew particularly successful after Gilliéron introduced his son, also named Émile, into the business around 1909. The Gilliérons' work has been credited as a major influence on the public and academic perception of Greek antiquity, particularly Minoan civilisation, and with disseminating the influence of ancient cultures to modernist writers, artists and intellectuals such as James Joyce, Sigmund Freud and Pablo Picasso.

Many of Gilliéron's restorations were made from highly fragmentary evidence, and he often made bold, imaginative decisions in reconstructing what he believed to be the original material. In several cases, his hypotheses have been challenged or overturned by more recent study. Gilliéron frequently muddied the distinction between his own restorations and the original material, and was criticised in his day for overshadowing ancient material with his own creations. He was also likely involved in the illegal export of forged antiquities from Greece, and has been accused of direct involvement in the manufacture of faked objects.

Early life and career

Louis Émile Emmanuel Gilliéron^[a] was born on 24 October 1850 in Villeneuve, Switzerland.^[2] He attended the Gymnasium in Villeneuve, where his father was the assistant master,^[3] then studied at the trade school (Gewerbeschule) in Basel from around 1872 to 1874. He was a student at the Art Academy (Kunstakademie) in Munich from 1875 to 1876, and finally at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris from around 1875 to 1876, where he was a student of the academic painter Isidore Pils.^[2] While Gilliéron worked there, Pils's atelier was employed to decorate sets for the Paris Opera.^[3]

By 1877, Gilliéron was established as an artist in Athens.^[4] He owned a house at 43 Skoufa Street in the fashionable Kolonaki district, which served as his home and atelier throughout his life.^[5] He quickly gained a reputation as an archaeological draughtsman, and was employed by the German Archaeological Institute at Athens as well as by Heinrich Schliemann, the excavator of the sites of Troy, Tiryns and Mycenae. Gilliéron worked for the latter as a painter, draughtsman and conservator until Schliemann's death in 1890.^[2] In the 1880s, Gilliéron was employed by the Greek royal family of George I to provide drawing lessons to their young sons: this gave him access to the upper echelons of Greek society, including the opportunity to collaborate with the Archaeological Society of Athens, a learned society dedicated to the excavation, restoration and study of ancient remains.^[2]

Gilliéron's skills were in demand, as photography was expensive and the results difficult to guarantee; photography was also generally unable to convey colour, whereas Gilliéron painted in bold

Gilliéron was hired to assist in the

In the spring of 1900, the British archaeologist Arthur Evans was excavating the Bronze-Age ruins – which he named the "Palace of Minos" – of the Minoan site of Knossos on Crete.^[4] Gilliéron was visiting Knossos on 1 May [O.S. 18 April], while Evans's draughtsman, Yannis Papadakis, was in the process of removing some of the first fresco fragments to be discovered in the so-called "Throne Room" of the palace: Gilliéron recognised the outline of a griffin in some of the fragments, which became an established part of Evans's reconstruction of the room's decoration.^[16] Evans wrote in his diary on 23 April [O.S. 10 April] that Gilliéron "began immediately to sort the fresco fragments like jigsaw puzzles" upon his arrival at Knossos.^[17]

Evans found a number of frescoes requiring complex reconstruction, which he felt to be beyond the skill of Papadakis;^[1] he instead contracted Gilliéron to assist in their documentation and restoration. Gilliéron and his son Émile, born in 1885 and generally known as "Gilliéron fils", would work for Evans at Knossos for the next three decades.^[4] Gilliéron cancelled all of his other commitments to work at Knossos; according to the archaeological historian Joseph MacGillivray, he believed that working there would allow him to "bask in the radiance of Evans's success ... [and] ensure his own fame and fortune".^[18] Evans constructed a gallery above the "Throne Room" to display copies of Gilliéron's work, replacing finds which had been removed for display at the Heraklion Archaeological Museum.^[19] Gilliéron also began, from 1901, to produce and sell replicas of the finds from Knossos.^[20] He offered versions reflecting the objects' state on discovery, as well as more extensively restored versions which purported to reproduce the objects as originally manufactured.^[21] In the case of objects such as the Harvester Vase from Hagia Triada, this required imaginatively reconstructing pieces of the object which had been lost or destroyed prior to discovery.^[21]

From around 1909–1910,^[22] Gilliéron gradually introduced his son into his business; the younger Gilliéron worked with his father at Volos in Thessaly and at Knossos in 1910–1912.^[2] Gilliéron père was hired between 1910 and 1912 by the German team, led by Georg Karo, continuing Schliemann's excavations at Tiryns; he restored the so-called "Shield Frieze" fresco from over two hundred fragments found in the inner forecourt of the palace. In some of his restorations at Tiryns, such as that of a woman carrying an ivory pyxis, Gilliéron disguised the distinction between original and restored material, creating the illusion that the entire fresco was original when in fact much of it was compiled from parts of other figures in the same scene.^[23] The two Gilliérons later worked with Karo on the publication of the finds from Schliemann's 1876 excavations of Grave Circle A at Mycenae, which Karo published between 1930 and 1933.^[24]

Over time, Gilliéron transferred an increasing proportion of his work to his son, and renamed his business Gilliéron et fils ('Gilliéron and Son'). Gilliéron fils has been credited by the archaeological historian Joan Mertens with improving the commercial success of their joint studio, and with extending its clientele to include patrons in Cuba and the United States as well as in Europe. Between 1906 and 1933, the Metropolitan Museum of Art purchased almost seven hundred artworks from the Gilliérons.^[22] The Gilliérons also worked on finds from Mycenae. Around 1906, Gilliéron père reproduced several of the objects from Grave Circle A, including the gold mask known as the “Mask of Agamemnon”. Around 1918–1919, the Gilliérons replicated a painted stele discovered at Mycenae in 1893.^[19]

Personal life and death

In his memoirs, de Chiricio described Gilliéron as "a tall, robust man, with a thick white beard trimmed to a point".^[25] Gilliéron married Joséphine Zoecchi in 1884.^[26] He died in Athens on 13 October 1924.^[2]

Assessment

Mertens has written that Gilliéron's significance lay partly in being present at the unearthing of so many major archaeological discoveries, and being able to record their original colours before exposure to light and air damaged them. She also notes the size of Gilliéron's professional network and his ability to parlay that into financial opportunities – both of which she describes as "exceptional".^[6] On a technical level, she describes Gilliéron's reconstructions from the archaic Acropolis as "tours de force of the watercolourist's art".^[27]

Influence of Gilliéron's work

MacGillivray has judged that Gilliéron produced "some of the most enduring watercolour reproductions of objects otherwise impossible to imagine because of their poor state of preservation".

Gilliéron's reconstructions often changed as his and his employers' assessments of the material evolved: a fresco at Knossos that he originally reconstructed as a young woman, labelled "Ariadne" by Evans after the mythical Cretan princess, became a figure of a male adolescent, described by the British archaeologist J. L. Myres as having "an European and almost classically Greek profile".^[29] When the English writer Evelyn Waugh visited Knossos in 1929, he wrote that it was impossible to gain an appreciation of Minoan painting there, since original fragments of fresco were crowded out by modern restorations, and judged that Evans and Gilliéron had "tempered their zeal for reconstruction with a predilection for the covers of Vogue".^[30] In 1969, the archaeologist Leonard Robert Palmer wrote a guide-book to the site of Knossos in which he described the "Ladies in Blue" fresco as "a spirited composition ... by M. Gilliéron".^[31] Gilliéron may also have invented the scalloped pattern around the edge of the "Bull-Leapers Fresco" from Knossos, for which no ancient evidence has survived.^[19] Gilliéron often consciously blurred the distinction between original material and his own restorations, both at Tiryns and at Knossos, where he placed some of his reconstructions directly onto the ancient walls, surrounding the original fragments.^[32] In some cases, as with the "Blue Boy" fresco, Gilliéron's reconstruction has been shown to be incorrect: Gilliéron reconstructed the image with a figure of a boy, but further investigation showed that it was originally a monkey.^[33]

Referring to the Gilliérons' practice of combining fragments later evaluated to have come from discrete images, a modern study has concluded that they "created a decorative programme which, as it currently stands, never existed".^[34] Gilliéron's reconstruction of the so-called "Priest-King Fresco", which he developed from 1905 onwards,^[35] has been particularly challenged: the fresco was reconstructed from fragments which both Evans and Gilliéron initially believed to belong to different figures, and MacGillivray has suggested that their decision to combine them was motivated by "Evans's need for an earthly authority at Knossos".^[36] The reconstruction was debated from the time of its publication in the 1920s.^[37] Between 1970 and 1990, the physician Jean Coulomb and the archaeologist Wolf-Dietrich Niemeier separately argued that the fragments did indeed belong to separate figures:^[38] Coulomb argued that the figure's torso belonged to a boxer,^[39] while Niemeier considered that the crown was more likely to belong to a female figure, either a sphinx or a goddess, in line with depictions of similar crowns in other Minoan paintings.^[40] It is also uncertain whether the figure's skin was originally coloured red, which would be typical of male figures in Minoan art, or white, which would be more typical of female figures.^[38]

Accusations of archaeological criminality

The Gilliérons have been accused of facilitating or participating in the creating and distribution of forged antiquities.^[41] The archaeologist Leonard Woolley, who visited Crete in 1923–1924, was present at a police raid on a workshop where local Cretan craftsmen produced forgeries of Minoan snake goddess figurines, and wrote that the forgers were working for Gilliéron.^[42] The historian Cathy Gere has called Gilliéron "almost certainly an important link in the chain between the forgers and the museums and dealers of Europe and America".^[43] While working with the Gilliérons on the Grave Circle A material, Karo came to suspect them of illicit activities.^[44] The archaeological historian Kenneth Lapatin has suggested that Gilliéron may have been the pseudonymous "Mr. Jones" from whom the collector Richard Berry Seager reported receiving the "Boston Goddess", a snake goddess figurine generally considered a forgery, in 1914;^[45] Gilleron may have offered the same object, or a similar forgery known as the "Baltimore Goddess", to Karo in the same year.^[46] Lapatin suggests that a remark of Karo's about "goldsmiths working part-time as forgers" may have been a veiled reference to the Gilliérons.^[42]

Selected restorations and replicas

• 
  The "Grandstand Fresco" from Knossos, restored by Gilliéron in 1909.^[47]
• 
  Rhyton in the shape of a bull's head, from Knossos, restored by Gilliéron in 1908^[48]
• 
  The "Blue Boy" fresco from Knossos, erroneously restored by Gilliéron with a boy instead of a monkey^[33]
• 
  Reproduction of the "Shield Frieze" at Tiryns, made by Gilliéron before 1912^[49]
• 
  Part of Gilliéron's restoration of a female figure, carrying a pyxis, from Tiryns^[19]
• 
  The "Bull-Leaping" or "Toreador" fresco from Knossos^[50]
• 
  Cast of kore 674 from the Acropolis of Athens, painted by the Gilliérons in the late nineteenth century.^[51]
• 
  Cast of kore 679 (the "Peplos Kore") from the Acropolis of Athens, painted by the Gilliérons in the late nineteenth century.^[52]
• 
  Cast of kore 686 (the "Euthydikos Kore") from the Acropolis of Athens, painted by the Gilliérons in the late nineteenth century.^[53]

Footnotes

Explanatory notes

References

Bibliography