Félicien de Saulcy

Félicien de Saulcy saw Cyprus for a single day. Born at Lille in 1807 and dead in Paris in 1880, he was a French artillery officer, numismatist and member of the Académie des Inscriptions, and in 1850 he obtained an official mission to Syria and Asia Minor^1,4. His diary puts the stop at Larnaca on 5 December 1850, though Merrillees reads the diary as dating the Mattei purchase to 6 December^2,3. He bought first from a grocer named Béraud, and then coins from Cesare Mattei³. Merrillees adds that the Mattei purchase included the tomb slab of Brocard de Charpigny, found at Nea Paphos in 1844².

The pieces went to Paris in 1851 and 1852. The slab entered the Musée de Cluny, as a gift from Saulcy or from Édouard Delessert, who travelled with him; the Revue archéologique of 1852 says both men acquired it at Larnaca². On 5 May 1851 he gave the Cabinet des Médailles a lot that included a ten-centimetre terracotta statuette of a woman, registered as found at Paphos by Saulcy. The editors of the Cabinet's early Cypriot acquisitions call that provenance worthless, since he only passed through Larnaca³. In 1851 he gave the Louvre the silver bowl AO 20135, which had been collected by Eugène Tastu, French consul at Larnaca. How it reached Saulcy is told in different ways: Caubet says he bought it from Tastu, while Marangou has Tastu rescuing it from a goldsmith's crucible². Merrillees argues that the bowl came from Kition rather than Idalion and that it was the only bowl Saulcy gave, a view that conflicts with Caubet's attribution to him of the gold cup AO 20134^2,5.

In 1867 he presided, with Wilhelm Froehner, over the committee of the planned Musée Parent⁶. In May 1869 Tiburce Colonna-Ceccaldi sent photographs of two Cypriot pieces and asked for the opinion of Froehner and Saulcy⁶.