WMF Britain welcomed a milestone event in April 2013: the return of the Stowe lions. These magnificent creatures, sculpted in lead with extraordinary detail, have now been reinstated to the plinths they knew in the eighteenth century, ninety years after they were sold in Stowe’s 1921 sale.
It is clear that they were based on the ‘Medici Lions’ commissioned by Ferdinando I de’Medici, and originally set in the Loggia dei Leoni at the Villa Medici, Rome. The basis was an antique Roman marble relief. This was worked up as a full figure looking to its right, by Giovanni di Scherano Fancelli in c.1598, and accompanied by a mirror-image version by contemporary sculptor Flaminio Vacca (1538-1605).
That original pair remained in Rome until 1789, before being moved to Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence, where they can still be seen today. The two sculptures were hugely influential in eighteenth-century Europe.
The date of purchase of lead versions of the sculptures by Stowe House’s owner Richard Temple-Grenville is unknown; indeed the attribution of these tooled casts to John Cheere (1709-87) was only made when conservator Rupert Harris found evidence of surface tooling characteristic of Cheere’s workshop.
John Cheere was a prodigious sculptor in lead, supplying the figures that adorn Queluz Palace Gardens, Lisbon– they were themselves a previous project of World Monuments Fund. The Stowe Lions may date from slightly later, as they were placed on limestone plinths cut for the steps to the South Front portico of Stowe, completed in the early 1770s to the amended designs of Robert Adam. They were originally painted golden yellow to match the limestone.
Source: wwf.org.uk