Anthony Radcliffe

curator and scholar of sculpture (1933—2011)

Our Fellow Tony (Anthony) Radcliffe, died on 1 January. Tony spent virtually the whole of his career at the V&A, latterly as Keeper of Sculpture (1979—89) before becoming Samuel H Kress Professor at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington in 1993—4. The pre-eminent authority on Renaissance bronzes, he published catalogues of the Frick Collection, the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection and the Robert H Smith Collection. The following extracts are taken from an obituary written by our Fellow Paul Williamson, Keeper of Sculpture, Metalwork, Ceramics and Glass at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

‘Anthony Frank Radcliffe (always Tony to his friends and colleagues) was born in Wivenhoe, Essex, on 23 February 1933, the son of a doctor. He was educated at Oundle School and read English at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, followed by national service in the Artillery Regiment between 1955 and 1957. Italy was already beginning to exert its lifelong pull on him when he went to work at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome in 1958. Further employment in film was hard to find, however, so when he applied for and was offered a job at the Victoria and Albert Museum he thought he should take it up, only intending to stay for a few months.

‘He entered the museum profession on the lowest rung of the curatorial ladder and was allocated to the Department of Circulation, the V&A department charged with preparing and touring exhibitions to the regions. It was not long before Radcliffe’s talents were recognised by the formidable Keeper of the Department of Architecture and Sculpture, John Pope-Hennessy, who arranged for him to assist with the ground-breaking exhibition of Italian Renaissance bronzes held in London (at the V&A), Amsterdam and Florence in 1961.

‘This opportunity was to shape his future career and set him on the path to inheriting Pope-Hennessy’s mantle as the outstanding scholar in the field. Many of the most beautiful and important bronzes ever made passed through his hands at this early stage, so that when he returned to the Circulation Department in 1961 he was already smitten with sculpture and determined to develop his knowledge in that area. He started to write on sculpture and in 1966 published his first book, European Bronze Statuettes, one of the excellent Connoisseur Monographs published by Michael Joseph under the general editorship of Frank Davis.

‘In 1967 Radcliffe was again poached by John Pope-Hennessy, who, on taking up the directorship of the V&A selected him as his Assistant, and he served in this capacity until 1974. This was an arduous post, challenging in the manifold duties he had to discharge and especially onerous because of the extraordinarily high standards demanded by Pope-Hennessy. He also benefited from close involvement with Pope-Hennessy’s academic projects. “The Pope” had catalogued the V&A’s outstanding collection of Italian sculpture in a three-volume work in 1964, but when the authorities of the Frick Collection in New York asked him to do the same with their sculpture collection he recognised that, with his directorial responsibilities, he would only be able to complete the work with considerable assistance, and Radcliffe was drafted in to help. In the event, he played such a major role that he was jointly credited on the title-page of the two volumes when they were published in 1970.

‘In 1974 Radcliffe was promoted to Assistant Keeper in the Department of Architecture and Sculpture. Now responsible, with his colleague Charles Avery, for all post-medieval sculpture in the national collection, he made a number of outstanding acquisitions, including Donatello’s Chellini Roundel. This was stopped from export in 1976 and purchased for the then extremely high price of £175,000, through a high-profile fundraising campaign and the support of the Art Fund. It was ironic that through the work of Radcliffe and other scholars of bronzes the price of these desirable items gradually increased beyond reach for all but the wealthiest individuals and institutions. The unintentional effect of Radcliffe’s scholarship on the market was also seen following the pioneering exhibition of 1978—9 that he and Avery organised with Manfred Leithe-Jasper of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna on Giambologna 1529—1608, Sculptor to the Medici (shown in Edinburgh, London and Vienna), which encouraged a new generation of dealers and collectors to focus on the sublime bronze statuettes of this great and original artist.

‘When the Keepership of the Department became vacant in 1979, Radcliffe was a popular choice to replace John Beckwith, the distinguished medievalist. He found himself faced with many challenging tasks and expended much energy on modernising the stores and other unglamorous but vital activities, but he found time (often eked out in the early hours, before he set off for work, or at weekends) to work on such memorable exhibitions as the Splendours of the Gonzaga (V&A, 1982), The Genius of Venice (Royal Academy of Arts, 1983—4), and Italian Renaissance Sculpture in the Time of Donatello (Detroit and Florence, 1985—6). He was also responsible for reorganising and reopening several major galleries, most notably the two great Cast Courts.

‘At the end of the 1980s, the V&A experienced seismic change in the curatorial ranks, brought about principally by a hostile report from the National Audit Office. This led in 1989 to the enforced departure of all the Keepers, with the exception of Radcliffe, who was invited to fill the new post of Head of Research. Following a restructuring, he stepped aside from this role in 1990 and effectively became Keeper Emeritus until his retirement at the age of sixty in 1993. He was exceedingly well thought of outside the museum and took up a number of short-term visiting posts, becoming Andrew W Mellon Senior Consultative Curator at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, in 1990, and a Visiting Scholar at the J Paul Getty Museum in 1991.

‘On retirement, further invitations came his way, most notably for the Kress Professorship for the year 1993—4 at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. In 1992 he had published, with Malcolm Baker and Michael Maek-Gérard, a superb catalogue of the Renaissance and later sculpture in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection: this was a spellbinding display from a master at the top of his game and a model of what the best object-based scholarship can deliver. It inspired and was followed by a catalogue of the fine Renaissance bronzes in the Robert H Smith Collection, published in 1994, and together these volumes will stand as monuments to his knowledge and acute understanding of Renaissance sculpture.

‘Honours continued: he was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London in 1993, appointed Cavaliere Ufficiale al Merito della Repubblica Italiana in 2003 (joining his medal from the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno of Florence in 1986) and he was delighted to be made Honorary Keeper of Renaissance and Baroque sculpture at the Fitzwilliam Museum in 1996. But his energies began to diminish in the late 1990s and his health was not robust, leading ultimately to lung cancer. In recent years he moved back to London from Berkshire to share a house with his two sons in New Cross. He had married Enid Cawkwell in 1960, from whom he had separated shortly after his retirement and who with his sons survives him. He died on 1 January 1 2011, at the age of seventy seven.’