FRANCIS HASKELL and NICHOLAS PENNY
TASTE AND THE ANTIQUE
The Lure of Classical Sculpture 1500-1900
Volume 1: Text
Revised and Amplified Edition by Adriano Aymonino and Eloisa Dodero
HARVEY MILLER PUBLISHERS
© 2024, Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN 978-1-909400-25-2 (SET) D/2024/0095/139
ISBN Volume 1 978-1-915487-13-1
ISBN Volume 2 978-1-915487-14-8
ISBN Volume 3 978-1-915487-15-5
Printed in the EU on acid-free paper
The Public and Private Collections of Rome
The statue court which Primaticcio visited in 1540 was the most complete and satisfying section of a huge enterprise which had been begun nearly forty years earlier, but which had subsequently been much neglected and much altered.1 In the years following 1485 Pope Innocent VIII had had built and handsomely decorated a villa on the high ground at the back of the old Vatican palace: because of its position the villa was given the name Belvedere, and this was soon extended to apply to the whole area. In 1503, shortly after succeeding to the papacy, Julius II employed Bramante to incorporate this country house into the main architectural complex of the Vatican, and this was to be achieved essentially through the building of two long covered corridors running between the two residences. The enclosed space, bounded by villa and palace to north and south and by the two walls to east and west, was to be divided into a series of courts on different levels, designed originally for the display of sculpture, for a formal garden and for an elaborate theatre.The sculpture court (which alone concerns us here) adjoined Innocent VIII’s villa and probably constituted the spur for the whole scheme. Certainly it was given priority over the rest of the building operations, and owing to the interest that it aroused we can form a fairly accurate impression of its appearance.
As he entered the court, the sixteenth-century visitor would have seen first the rows of orange trees symmetrically placed on the paving stones which covered the enclosed space.2 Opposite him was a loggia, at one end of which was a fountain to water the oranges, and, outside the court itself but well visible from it, there towered above this loggia the tall mulberries and cypresses which grew in an informal garden behind. To his right was the old-fashioned villa of Innocent VIII onto which one could climb by means of a small spiral staircase in order to see the papal palace at the foot of the hill and, in the opposite direction, uninterrupted open countryside. In the centre of the court were two huge reclining marble figures of the Tiber and the Nile, each mounted as a fountain—and still more fountains were placed elsewhere. It was in this cool, fresh, and orange-scented atmosphere that the visitor was able to view the great sculptures placed in elaborately painted and decorated niches (cappelette)3 at the four corners of the court and in the centre of each enclosing wall; around and set into these walls, level with the upper part of the niches, were thirteen antique masks.4
The whole concept of displaying art in this way—this very notion of art in itself—was as new as it was unique, and it is hardly surprising that the impact was overwhelming: indeed, the classical antiquities kept in this walled garden with its orange trees and fountains set the standards by which art of all kinds was to be evaluated for more than three hundred years.Yet it was a concept born of faith rather than of exigency. When the statue court was designed for Pope Julius II at least five, and possibly more, niches for sculpture were apparently incorporated into the original plans.5 At that time he owned only one piece, the Apollo, which he considered worthy of placing in this court. Who could conceivably have foreseen the discovery,
some three years after his accession to the papacy, of the Laocoön which he was able to acquire and place in ‘a little chapel’ whose site had already been determined, even if the structure was not yet complete? In the second half of the fifteenth century the collecting of antiquities was far less common in Rome than in Florence,6 but Julius II could look back to two remarkable, if contrasting, precedents. Pietro Barbo (Pope Paul II, 1464-71) had amassed large numbers of gems, coins, and small bronzes, but, although he was interested in restoring the ancient monuments of Rome,7 he evidently looked upon his collections as being entirely his personal property and he made no provision for their future. At his death they were dispersed by his successor Sixtus IV—and, significantly, the greater part of them were taken to Florence by Lorenzo de’ Medici, for demand was still limited in Rome.8 Sixtus IV (1471-84) responded to antiquities in precisely the opposite way. It would seem that he took very little interest in them for their own sakes, but that at times he appreciated the immense historical and associational importance that they held for the city over which he ruled.9
Fig. 3. Workshop of Severo Calzetta (‘da Ravenna’), Inkstand with the Spinario, c. 1510-30, bronze, 26.4 × 14 × 11.5 cm, Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford (no. WA1899.CDEF.B1078)
Casts and Copies in Seventeenth-Century Courts
Charles I of England on his succession to the throne in 1625 ‘amply testified a Royal liking of ancient statues, by causing a whole army of Old forraine Emperours, Captaines, and Senators all at once to land on his coasts, to come and do him homage, and attend him in his palaces of Saint James, and Sommerset house’.1 A few of his statues came from Greece and the Levant where the agents of other English collectors—the Earl of Arundel, the Duke of Buckingham, and the Earl of Pembroke—had been busy for some time; more came from Mantua; but the king knew that the best statues could only be obtained in casts and copies. By 1629 ‘ingenious Master Gage’, who had been a secret agent of James I in Rome earlier in the decade, had managed to obtain moulds of Cardinal Borghese’s Gladiator. By 1630 the Gladiator was being cast in bronze and a pedestal was completed for its display in the Privy Garden at St. James’s Palace.2 In the following year the bronze-founder Hubert Le Sueur (‘Praxiteles’ Le Sueur as he sometimes styled himself) was dispatched to Italy to purchase ‘the moulds and patterns of certain figures and antiques there’.
One of the king’s secret agents, Walter Montagu, had these packed up in Rome and their transport to England was organised by Inigo Jones through an English factor in Livorno.3 By 1634 half a dozen bronze copies had been cast by Le Sueur, and others were being prepared.4 We know that these included the Antinous and the Commodus as Hercules of the Belvedere, and the Diane Chasseresse then in the Louvre, which still survive. There was also a copy of the Spinario (‘The Boy or Pickthorne’) and perhaps copies of a Venus and of Cleopatra, but these cannot be traced.5
In 1642 civil war broke out and in 1649 Charles was beheaded. All the bronze copies listed above were sold in 1650 or 1651 and were among the most valued items in the royal collection (although no statues, ancient or modern, were to be ranked with ‘that incompareable head in marble of ye late King’s, done by Cavaliere Bernino’).6 Oliver Cromwell withdrew some sculptures from the sale ‘on account of their antiquity and rarity’ and he bought back the copy of the Antinous. These statues were kept at Whitehall, where some, in the Privy Gardens, were defaced in an attack by a Quaker armed with a hammer. The fanatic was apprehended only after he had smashed down a door leading to the Volary Garden where he intended to assault the Antinous 7 After the restoration of the monarchy in the following year, the Diana and the Commodus as Hercules were reunited with the Antinous, only to be damaged by the Whitehall fires of 1691 and 1698. The Gladiator also returned to the royal collection and was set up at the end of the Long Water in St. James’s Park until 1701 when it was taken with the Whitehall bronzes to Hampton Court. The fire damage was then repaired8 (although Diana’s stag was never replaced). George IV later removed the statues to the east terrace garden of Windsor Castle,9 where they were joined by a cast of the ‘Warwick Vase’.
In addition to the full-scale bronze copies whose fortunes we have just traced, King Charles also owned a number of smaller pieces which might have been copies after the antique, and one which
certainly was: ‘Laocoön w th his two Sonns killed by the great serpents w ch my Lo: Marquess [of Hamilton] bought from Germany’.10 But the large bronzes were much more unusual. They suggest that the English king wished to emulate the achievement of François Ier at Fontainebleau a century earlier.
The French had certainly not forgotten that achievement, and it was in order to continue François Ier’s projects 11 that Roland Fréart, Sieur de Chambray, and his brother Jean, Sieur de Chantelou, were ordered in 1640 by M. de Noyers, Louis XIII’s Surintendant des Bâtiments, to secure the services of the leading French artist in Italy, Nicolas Poussin, and, in Chambray’s words, translated by Evelyn,
to get made, and collect together all that the leisure and opportunity of our Voyage could furnish us of the most excellent Antiquities , as well in Architecture as Sculpture ; the chief pieces whereof were two huge Capitals . . . from within the Rotunda
Two Medails . . . taken from the Triumphal Arch of Constantine ; threescore and ten Basreliefs moulded from Trajan’s Column , and several other of particular Histories , some of which were the next year cast in Brass 12
Among those which were cast ‘in brass’ were a relief from the Villa Medici and two from the Borghese collection, 13 but, as Chambray explains, most of the casts were used as stucco relief ornaments ‘about the Compartiment of the arched Ceiling of the Louvre great Gallery , in which M. Le Poussin most ingeniously introduc’d them’, partly it seems as an expedient prompted by his patron’s haste and economy, and partly because he was disinclined to collaborate with other painters.14
In 1643 Chantelou returned to Italy with royal offerings to the Madonna of Loreto for the successful birth of the Dauphin (later Louis XIV), and he took advantage of his trip to order casts of ‘other medails from the same Arch of Constantine’ and also of the colossal Farnese Flora and Hercules and of the still larger ‘ Colosses of Montecavallo with their Horses , the greatest and most celebrated works of Antiquity , which M. de Noyers designed to have also cast in Copper to place them at the principal Entry of the Louvre’. Poussin, who had by now returned to Rome, seems to have helped organise the making of these casts, and the problems involved with the moulds taken from the Farnese Hercules are discussed by him in letters to Chantelou of 1645 and 1647,15 but by then ‘all these mighty Projects’, as Chambray called them, had been abandoned, for after the death of Cardinal Richelieu in 1642 and the fall of de Noyers, and the death of the king in 1643, there were no powerful statesmen in France who supported them.
In 1650, a few years after the French had abandoned these ‘mighty Projects’, Diego Velázquez, the Spanish court painter, travelled for the second time to Italy. His visit was made in connection with the furnishing of the new apartments of the fortress of the Alcázar, recently converted by Philip IV into a palace, over which the painter had been given general charge. He returned to Spain in the following year, having secured the services of two fresco painters, Colonna and Mitelli, and with numerous sixteenth-century paintings to swell the royal collections. 16 But to contemporaries Velázquez’s most important achievement in Italy was to acquire, through the favour of the pro-Spanish Pope Innocent X, a set of plaster casts, together with some bronze copies, of the most beautiful antique statues in Rome. 17 The fact that a series of busts of the Caesars and a replica of the Spinario (presented to Philip II in 1561) already existed in Spain cannot have diminished the impact made by the arrival of these casts and copies. The palace inventory of 1666 valued the casts of the Farnese Flora and Hercules as each worth more than Velázquez’s ‘Bacchus’ and twice as much as any of his portraits, while only Velázquez’s ‘Las Meninas’ and a few Titians were more highly valued than the bronze copy of the Hermaphrodite . 18
produced of the Arrotino, the Venus de’ Medici (Fig. 54), and other figures in the Uffizi.11 There are also very crude Staffordshire salt-glazed earthenware figurines which date from the 1750s, modelled, it seems, after a distorting print of the Spinario. 12 In the 1760s Beyer modelled a rococo version of the Venus de’ Medici (supplied with a greatly inflated blue, orange, and green dolphin) for the Ludwigsburg factory,13 and there are other copies, either in rococo porcelain, such as those made at Bow, or, comic, in polychrome glazed earthenware (Fig. 55), such as those made in Staffordshire by the Wood family, dating from the following decades,14 but they are hardly what Algarotti had in mind. He would have been more appreciative of the biscuit statuettes after the antique made by the Sèvres factory between 1768 and 1770, but the fact that only a limited number were produced suggests that such an initiative was still premature.15
Fig. 55. Enoch Wood of Staffordshire, Companion figurines of Mark Anthony and Cleopatra, c. 1780, coloured creamware, 15.24 × 31.12 × 10.16 cm, Etruria Antiques Gallery
Fig. 56. Giovanni Volpato, Nile, c. 1785-95, hard-paste biscuit porcelain, 30.2 × 58.7 × 29.5 cm, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (no. 2001.456).
One of the things Algarotti had envisaged was a ceramic equivalent to the sets of little bronzes which were to be profitably produced by Roman founders in the last decades of the century, and it was not until 1785 that Giovanni Volpato—a leading engraver, and a friend of Gavin Hamilton, Angelica Kauffman, and Canova—opened a factory in the Via Pudenziana in Rome with the intention of doing just that. He specialised in biscuit porcelain reproductions of the same size and in many cases of the same subjects as the statuettes sold by Righetti and Zoffoli (Fig. 56). Encouraged by ‘Madame Angelica’, C.H. Tatham sent a list of the firm’s products to Henry Holland in 1795 remarking that the porcelain was similar in quality to the French but ‘very superior as to design, workmanship and art’. ‘At this depot’, noted the Baron d’Uklanski, ‘you may now have the finest things of this description which interest the dilettante and do not disgrace even an elegant drawing-room’.16 Volpato also established, two years before his death in 1801, a factory at Civita Castellana producing coarser and cheaper figures, also after the antique, which continued under his grandson’s management until the mid-nineteenth century (although the factory in the Via Pudenziana closed in 1818).17 Even before Volpato opened his first factory, the Ludwigsburg porcelain factory had taken some steps in the same direction, as had the new Royal Porcelan Factory at Naples under the direction of Domenico Venuti.18 Another Neapolitan factory—that of the Giustiniani— also later produced figures of this type.19
Algarotti’s other ideas anticipated the works of the Staffordshire potter Josiah Wedgwood, who established a reputation in the 1760s with his creamware inspired by the ‘chaste simplicity’ of antique art. By the mid1770s he was imitating ‘Etruscan’ vases in a new black porcelain bisque (basaltes), producing small busts of Homer, Cicero, the Zingara and the like in the same material, and had devised a new body (jasper) which he was beginning to use for ‘intaglios, cameos, medallions, and tablets’ adorned with copies of antique reliefs and statues ranging from the Dacia to the Farnese Hercules (Fig. 57).20
Innovation and experiment in ceramic technology also coincided with neoclassical taste in the artificial stone products of Mrs. Coade’s factory at Lambeth in London, in the last third of the century. The Coade factory produced some copies of antique vases and reliefs and statues suitable for interior or exterior use21 much the same statues in fact as the earlier London lead-founders, whose business seems to have declined with the rise of this rival alternative to costly bronze and vulnerable marble. In fact, Coade stone copies were intended for the same places as copies in lead, bronze, or plaster. On the other hand, the display of copies after the antique on the dining-room table and chimneypiece was a new idea. And so too was their popularity on an even smaller and more intimate scale, on snuff boxes, and in rings, chatelains, bracelets, and necklaces (Fig. 58).
During the eighteenth century it became an increasingly popular hobby among dilettanti to collect and even to make their own paste impressions from gems. In the mid-century, Philipp Daniel Lippert, working in Dresden, invented a type of white paste for this purpose, and by 1756 he offered for sale impressions of two thousand gems.22 In Rome, where Baron Stosch’s former servant Christian Dehn sold pastes and sulphurs, German travellers on the Grand Tour were also given evening classes by Johann Friedrich Reiffenstein in matters such as making replicas of variegated cameos.23 In London at the same time James Tassie, a Scottish wax portraitist at first employed by Wedgwood, began to achieve an international reputation for his work in this field. Among the long catalogues, which he published in 1775 and 1791, of the cameos and intaglios which he cast ‘in coloured pastes, white enamel and sulphur’24 were numerous modern works by artists such as the Sirlettis or the Pichlers, and of these many were copies of antiques such as the Laocoön group, Antinous, Agrippina, Zingara, Papirius, and the Apollo Sauroctonus. Among the cameos and intaglios listed by Wedgwood in 1779 such statues also featured prominently.25 The greatest English gem-engraver, Nathaniel Marchant, during his residence in Rome (when he was also very active exporting plaster casts to England)26 specialised in reproducing antique statues on gems for wealthy travellers, and when he returned to England he sold
43. Borghese Gladiator1
paris, louvre (inv. mr 224 [ma 527])
Pentelic marble2
Height: 1.99 m; length: 1.57 m
Inscribed: (Agasias of Ephesus, son of Dosithéos, made it)
Also known as: Achilles,3 Fighting Gladiator,4 Lutteur,5 Discobolus,6 Hector, Borghese Warrior,7 Ajax,8 Leonidas,9 Héros Combattant,10 Telamon11
Literature: Hamiaux 1992-8, II, pp. 50-4, no. 60; Kalveram 1995, pp. 111-15, 208-10, no. 94; Bourgeois and Pasquier 1997; Hamiaux 1992-8, II, pp. 50-4, no. 60; D’après l’antique 2000-1, pp. 14451, 276-95, 391-5;Winckelmann 2006, pp. 259-60, no. 570; Di Cosmo and Fatticcioni 2012, pp. 37680, no. 26; CensusID 10033711
This statue is first recorded on 11 June 161112 when it was being restored for Cardinal Scipione Borghese, after having been found at Nettuno (near Anzio) in 1609 or 1611.13 The restoration of the Gladiator, which was probably the work of Nicolas Cordier,14 involved mainly the addition of the right arm, while later restorations added or replaced the right ear and some toes (see below for details).15 A drawing survives, possibly showing two sketches of the upper part of the statue in its pre-restored state.16 In 1613 it was certainly in the Borghese palace in the Borgo Pio where it was displayed as part of a group showing Achilles battling with the Amazons—Francucci and Demisiani indeed make it sound as if there was a narrative connection,17 and in 1620 it was transported with the best works of the cardinal’s collection to the Villa Borghese on the Pincian Hill.18 In 1621 the Gladiator was placed on a plinth adorned with white marble and alabaster in a room named after it on the ground floor of the villa (current room VI).19 The room was completely refurbished by the architect Antonio Asprucci for Prince Marcantonio IV Borghese in 1780-4, and decorated with images of war and athletics.20 For the occasion, Agostino Penna sculpted four bas-reliefs on the statue’s base representing gladiators, boxers, wrestlers, and boules players.21 On 27 September 1807 it was purchased (together with the bulk of the Borghese antiquities) by Napoleon Bonaparte, brother-inlaw of Prince Camillo Borghese.22 It was sent from Rome on 3 August 1808 and reached the Musée Napoléon on 12 October of the same year,23 and by 1811 it had been placed in the Salle d’Apollon.24 By 1815 it was in a room specially named after it,25 and retained the same position also after the reorganisation of the museum in 1817.26 Since 1997 it has been displayed in the Galerie Daru.27
As early as 1622 an English visitor was told that the Gladiator was one of the two chief sculptures in the Villa Borghese (the other was a ‘Venera’),28 and it remained the most admired work of antiquity in the villa for the two centuries of its installation there: ‘it is, according to some connoisseurs’,
observed Lalande, ‘tout ce que l’on connoît de plus beau dans l’antique’,29 and soon after it had left for Paris a traveller commented that it was ‘the last of those great preceptive statues which served at Rome as canons of the art’.30
Within twenty years of its discovery a bronze cast had been made by Hubert Le Sueur for Charles I (now at Windsor),31 and this in itself became one of the most famous sculptures in England.32 Another bronze cast by Le Sueur and presumably made by special permission of the king, had before 1645 been installed in the oval circus of the gardens designed by Isaac de Caus for the 4th Earl of Pembroke at Wilton, where it was described as ‘the most famous statue of all that Antiquity hath left’.33 This in turn was given to Sir Robert Walpole by the 8th Earl and it still stands on the grand, but somewhat awkward, temple-like structure devised for it by William Kent in the stairwell at Houghton Hall in Norfolk.34 Le Sueur went on producing other full-size bronze replicas of the Gladiator after his return to Paris from England in 1641.35
In 1638 Perrier published no less than four views of the Gladiator (more than the number given to any other figure) in his selection of the finest statues in Rome,36 and a quarter of a century later Bernini (who as a young man had measured his talents against it when carving his ‘David’, which was also kept in the Villa Borghese) told his hosts in France that it ranked with the most beautiful of statues.37 The Gladiator reappears also in most subsequent printed anthologies, including those of Sandrart and Maffei and De Rossi.38 But, though a cast was made for Philip IV, supplied by Velázquez,39 and there was naturally a plaster of the Gladiator in the French Academies in Paris and in Rome,40 it does not seem to have been copied in marble for Louis XIV.41
Towards the end of the seventeenth century a version in gilded bronze was installed among the copies after the antique in the gardens of Herrenhausen at Hannover42 and somewhat later two pairs of the figure, lightly draped, were used to make an imposing entrance to the gardens at Schloss Mirabell, which were laid out, in part, by
Fischer von Erlach for the archbishop of Salzburg; another pair confront each other on the gate piers in the forecourt of Schloss Charlottenburg, Berlin, and a pair made in 1779 for the east entrance to the royal promenade at Łazienki Palace outside Warsaw now flank the main façade. Copies of the Gladiator were also paired to serve as fountains (the water issuing from serpents coiled round the extended arms) on the terrace near the base of the Grand Cascade at the royal palace of Peterhof outside Saint Petersburg, and in 1800 these versions in lead were replaced by others of gilded bronze (Fig. 51).43 In England, Cheere supplied full-size copies from the early 1740s,44 and Peter Scheemakers owned a model that he had probably brought back from Rome in the early 1730s, as well as a mould and cast of the statue.45 He possibly supplied a cast to Lord Cobham: in the park at Stowe, outside the Temple of Friendship dedicated to leading members of the Whig Opposition, a copy of the Borghese Gladiator alluded to the struggles in the larger political arena.46 Full-size copies were to be found in the grounds of many English country houses during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: at the Duke of Bedford’s Woburn Abbey in Bedfordshire (a bronze cast by Sir Richard Westmacott erected in 1827),47 and a lead cast at the Duke of Dorset’s Knole in Kent, for instance.48 In 1765 the French painter Louis Gabriel Blanchet executed the Borghese Gladiator in grisaille as part of a series of eight paintings for Saltram, in Devon.49 And there were many other seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury copies in France, in the royal collection and in those of Richelieu, Mazarin, and Colbert, among others.50 In fact, the demand for copies was so great that towards the end of the eighteenth century, Prince Borghese tried to prevent the taking of further moulds. In 1770 Burney wrote that ‘crowned heads are refused the privilege of having it cast, the Empress of Russia among the rest’,51 and eighteen years later Ménageot, director of the French Academy in Rome, pointed out that there was only one mould of the Gladiator in Rome, and that was badly worn.52
78. Spinario1
rome, musei capitolini, palazzo dei conservatori (inv. s 1186)
Bronze
Height (without plinth): 0.73 m
Also known as: Absalom,2 Priapus,3 Rodriguillo español,4 Marzo,5 Pastor,6 Battus,7 Corydon,8 Martio Pastorello,9 Cneius Martius,10 Nudo alla spina, Cneius Pecoranus,11 Pickthorne, Slave removing a thorn from his foot, Jeune Vainqueur à la course,12 Il Fedele,13 Tireur d’Épine14
no. 615; Bober and Rubinstein 2010, pp. 2546, no. 203; Età della conquista 2010, pp. 3023, no. III12 (C. Parisi Presicce); Di Cosmo and Fatticcioni 2012, pp. 415-18, no. 42; Dalli Regoli 2013; CensusID 155719
The Spinario was recorded between 1165 and 1167 by the Spanish Jew Benjamin ben Jonah of Tudela as being located outside the Lateran Palace15 and it must have been among the bronzes transferred from there to the Palazzo dei Conservatori on the Capitol by Pope Sixtus IV after 1471.16 It was recorded there for certain in 1490,17 and, more specifically, in c. 1496-7 in an upstairs room together with the Camillus 18 From this time onwards, visual and verbal representations testify that it was placed elevated on a column.19 The Spinario was ceded to the French under the terms of the Treaty of Tolentino in 1797,20 reached Paris in the triumphal procession of July 1798,21 and was displayed in the Musée Central des Arts when it was inaugurated on 9 November 1800.22 Thanks to Canova’s diplomatic mission,23 it was removed in October 1815,24 arrived back in Rome in the first half of 1816 and was returned to the Palazzo dei Conservatori in the course of the same year,25 displayed in the Sala dei Fasti. It was then moved several times within the museum but, since 1917, has been displayed in the Sala dei Trionfi di Mario (but, at the time of writing, is temporarily located in the Esedra del Marco Aurelio).26
Literature: Zanker 1974, pp. 71-94; Schweikhart 1977; D’après l’antique 2000-1, pp. 200-25, 41620; Amedick 2005; Winkelmann 2006, pp. 278-9,
Benjamin ben Jonah of Tudela who was in Rome between 1165 and 1167 described the Spinario as Absalom, the best-known male beauty of the Old Testament (without blemish from ‘the sole of his foot even to the crown of his head’).27 However, ‘Magister Gregorius’ in c. 1190-1230 recorded that it was called Priapus and was ‘ridiculosus’. The statue was then placed on a column so that the boy was seen from below but it is curious that Gregorius writes ‘mire magnitudinis virilia videbis’ since the genitals are of ordinary dimensions.28 In the Middle Ages it also became known as ‘Marzo’, as it was used to represent the month of March in cycles of the months.29 Fulvio first identified the
statue as a shepherd (pastor), inaugurating a tradition that ran through the Renaissance,30 while Marlianus specified further that he was the shepherd Battus in Theocritus’s Idyll (IV, 50-5), who had a thorn in his foot extracted by his friend Corydon.31 Despite the scorn of the learned such as Maffei,32 the medieval and Renaissance traditions must have converged at some point to form the story that the statue had been ordered by the Roman Senate to commemorate a shepherd boy called Martius, who bore a message to them with such conscientious dispatch that he only stopped to remove a thorn from his foot after his arrival. By 1609 a plaque in the Palazzo dei Conservatori sanctioned this interpretation, presenting the statue as ‘Eneum Martii Pastoris Simulacrum’.33 This fanciful account was popular even with the erudite during the seventeenth and for much of the eighteenth century, and it survived into the nineteenth.34 While Joachim von Sandrart identified it with Corydon35—inverting the characters of Theocritus—by the end of the eighteenth century scholars were trying to convince their readers that the statue was one of the earliest monuments commemorating a victor in the Greek games,36 but as late as 1882 the popular title in Rome remained ‘Il Fedele’ (in reference to the faithfulness of the shepherd Martius to the Roman Senate).37
The motif of the Spinario was already immensely diffused in the Middle Ages, found on architectural sculpture (reliefs, capitals, corbels), grave sculpture, ivory carvings (croziers), bronze equipment (candlesticks), mosaics, manuscripts, or as relief decoration of fountains, baptismal fonts, and pulpits. The geographical span ranges from architectural sculpture in the south of Italy to baptismal fonts in Gottland.38 While many studies consider the Roman Spinario as the prototype for all these adaptations, it is probable that various other antique versions of the statue, or adaptations of the motif in Roman sarcophagi or late antique manuscripts, can also be credited for its medieval success.39
While it is debatable whether Masaccio drew inspiration from the Spinario, 40 it is probable that
Filippo Brunelleschi adapted the statue’s pose for the left-hand attendant in ‘The Sacrifice of Isaac’, his trial piece of 1401 for the doors of the Baptistery of S. Giovanni.41 In the fifteenth century it remained a popular source of inspiration, adapted for clothed or nude figures in paintings or frescoes by Francesco del Cossa, Luca Signorelli, Pinturicchio, and Botticelli and at times the elegant pose was even transferred to nude nymphs.42 After its relocation to the Capitol in 1471, the Spinario’s fame grew extensively, and with the Marcus Aurelius it was one of the first antique statues to be copied in three dimensions—often rather freely, sometimes in reverse, occasionally with an inkwell (Fig. 3), and often paired with a similarly reduced bronze of the Nymph ‘alla spina’.43 Half a dozen small bronze versions have been attributed to the late fifteenthand early sixteenth-century bronze-founder Severo da Ravenna;44 Pier Jacopo Alari Bonacolsi, called ‘Antico’, had cast a bronze statuette of the figure by 1496, while in March 1501 he created one for Isabella d’Este—and in 1503 he made a pendant for her,45 probably the ‘Seated Nymph’ today in the Smith Collection in Washington, DC;46 whilst a larger bronze adaptation by Antonello Gagini adorned a fountain dated 1500 at Messina, possibly the one now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York—probably the first life-size copy in the same medium ever executed after an antique statue.47 On at least two occasions in the sixteenth century bronze copies were thought of as suitable royal presents: one cast made in Rome was presented by Ippolito II d’Este to François Ier for Fontainebleau—a transaction conducted in 1540 through Benvenuto Cellini.48 This is the first known instance of a cast made from piecemoulds taken directly from the original.49 Another cast—probably by Guglielmo della Porta—was given in 1561 by Cardinal Ricci to Philip II of Spain, and installed by Philip III in 1615 at the centre of a fountain in the gardens of the Palacio of Aranjuez, where it still remains.50 Della Porta sold another life-size bronze replica to Ottavio Farnese in 1575.51 In the seventeenth century a bronze copy by Hubert Le Sueur was recorded in
41. Farnese Flora1
naples, museo archeologico nazionale (inv. 6409)
Pentelic marble2 Height: 3.44 m
Also known as: Muse,3 Hope (Spes; Speranza),4 Goddess,5 Courtesan,6 Venus stephanousa, 7 Erato, or Terpsichore,8 Dancer,9 Hour10
2009-10, III, pp. 37-42, no. 8, plate VI, 1-5 (C. Capaldi); Di Cosmo and Fatticcioni 2012, pp. 470-3, plate 62; Fabbri 2019, pp. 210-12, fig. 3; CensusID 156661
The statue is drawn three times from different angles together with another statue (also to be called a Flora and also now in Naples) by Heemskerck who was in Rome between 1532 and 1537.11 In a text published in 1556, but based on notes made in Rome six or seven years earlier, both statues still in an unrestored condition were recorded by Aldrovandi as being located in the courtyard of the Palazzo Farnese, Rome.12 The Flora is depicted by Cavalleriis in 1561;13 by then a diademed head, both arms, a circular floral wreath held with the left hand, and the feet had been added. This first campaign of restoration can confidently be attributed to Guglielmo della Porta, who also restored the Farnese Hercules. 14 The statue remained in the palace courtyard until 30 June 1787 when it was removed to the studio of the Roman restorer Carlo Albacini who sent it on to Naples in February 1800.15 By 1805 it was in the Museo degli Studi (later Museo Borbonico, now Museo Archeologico Nazionale).16 In 1806 Denon proposed to remove the Flora to enrich the Musée Napoléon,17 but the statue remained in Naples, where in 1809 Albacini’s additions (head and left hand) were removed and substituted with additions in plaster by Filippo Tagliolini.18 The Flora is now displayed in the new Farnese wing of the museum.
Literature: Sadurska 1987; Collezioni Napoli 1989, pp. 178-9, no. 172; Winckelmann 2006, p. 188, no. 398; Prisco 2007-8, passim; Sculture Farnese
The unrestored statue was noted by Aldrovandi on account of its size but was not considered by him to be any more remarkable than the other colossal draped female torso displayed with it at the time (and, to judge from Heemskerck’s drawings, more than a decade earlier).19 Aldrovandi described both statues as Muses, but the second of the two, which had fruit and flowers on the fold of its dress, was renamed Flora, and the first (the Farnese Flora) was restored as her companion, so that there were a pair of Floras and a pair of Hercules in the palace courtyard—popularly believed to be the results of competitions in antiquity between ‘two perfect
When Lord Elgin’s chaplain, Dr. Philip Hunt, was astonished by the delicacy of the drapery of the pedimental statues of the Parthenon he could only liken it to that of the Farnese Flora, the beauty of which was proverbial.23 To Maffei such drapery was clearly the transparent material appropriate for a courtesan, and he related the statue to the Flora who allegedly left her ill-gotten gains to the Senate to endow the games after her, and who was, according to the third-century Christian author Lactantius, honoured by the embarrassed Senate as a goddess.24 Confusingly Aldrovandi had associated the same tradition with a head also in the Farnese collection.25 This courtesan, however, was Roman, and by 1755 some scholars believed that the Flora was a statue of Venus by Praxiteles mentioned by Pliny.26
The restorations were criticised in the late eighteenth century,27 and awareness of them led to speculation as to the statue’s original identity. Winckelmann suggested Erato or Terpsichore (Muses of lyric arts), or one of the Hours,28 whilst Visconti revived a sixteenth-century idea that it was a personification of Hope, followed in this by Francesco Piranesi.29 Albacini provided the Flora with a new head, wreathed with a garland, and exchanged the statue’s chaplet for a nosegay, but these additions were considered inadequate and were later replaced, in plaster, by Filippo Tagliolini with a classicising head, adorned with a fillet, and the left hand holding a bunch of flowers.30 The late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century alterations, however, did nothing to change the
statue’s identity31 and in 1825 Finati remarked that ‘Flora’ was as good a name as any.32
Because of the colossal size, full-scale copies of the Flora are rare. Examples include a marble version made by Jean Raon in 1684-6 and in 1688 transferred to Verasilles with a marble copy of the Farnese Hercules by Cornu.33 A full-size Flora by John Cheere (1755), perhaps in lead and destroyed by a storm in the twentieth century, aptly presided on top of a Doric column over the gardens of Syon House redesigned at that time by ‘Capability’ Brown.34 Another full-size Flora, in bronze, is paired with a copy of the Farnese Hercules at the imperial Russian palace of Tsarskoye Selo by Fyodor Gordeyevich Gordeyev (1783/6).35 A full-size marble copy by Paolo Triscornia is now in the Aleksandrovskij garden in Saint Petersburg,36 and another, companion with a copy of the Farnese Hercules, is to be seen on the first floor level of the main façade of the Academy of Fine Arts in the same city, flanked by two pairs of gigantic columns, perhaps a homage to the courtyard of Palazzo Farnese in Rome.
Among the numerous marble copies reduced to life size (or slightly more than life size), those made by French sculptors in the 1670s and 1680s are early examples,37 such as that made by André for Colbert in 1676 for the Orangerie of his castle in Sceaux and now in the Tuileries garden.38 A replica in stone (c. 2 m) was executed by Stefano Szwaner between 1688 and 1696 for Jan III Sobieski to decorate the attic of his palace at Wilanów.39 A slightly modified version was sculpted by Johann Christian Kirchner around 1718 for the Dresden Zwinger.40 A copy by Delvaux, signed and dating to the period of the sculptor’s sojourn in Rome (1728-1732), is now at Englefield House, Berkshire,41 and there is an excellent one made by John Michael Rysbrack for the Pantheon at Stourhead in Wiltshire between 1759 and 1762 (Fig. 43).42 Frederick II Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel purchased a marble statuette from Bartolomeo Cavaceppi, paired with a ‘Ceres’ by the same artist, for the Museum Fredericianum in the late 1770s.43
Modified versions, reflecting the late eighteenth-century debate on the identity of the cunning masters’.20 By the seventeenth century, however, the Farnese Flora and the Farnese Hercules had far surpassed their companions in fame, and well into the eighteenth century they significantly appeared together in Panini’s capricci 21 The tradition was established that they had been discovered together, although there is no evidence that the Flora was even found in the Baths of Caracalla, as reported by Bartoli,22 and the drawing by Heemskerck testifies that the Flora was already known years before the beginning of the Farnese excavations of the Baths in 1545.
FRANCIS HASKELL and NICHOLAS PENNY
TASTE AND THE ANTIQUE
The Lure of Classical Sculpture 1500-1900
Volume 2: Originals
Revised and Amplified Edition by Adriano Aymonino and Eloisa Dodero
HARVEY MILLER PUBLISHERS
43. Borghese Gladiator
30. Diane Chasseresse
78. Spinario
24. Cleopatra
41. Farnese Flora
52. Laocoön
FRANCIS HASKELL and NICHOLAS PENNY
TASTE AND THE ANTIQUE
The
Lure of Classical Sculpture
1500-1900
Volume 3: Replicas and Adaptations
Edited by Adriano Aymonino
HARVEY MILLER PUBLISHERS
Fig. 12. After Charles Errard, The Skeleton of the Borghese Gladiator, c. 1691, engraving, 33.4 × 28 cm, Bibliothèque des Arts décoratifs, Paris (no. Album Maciet 2-4, 1)
14. Jean
after
in Anatomie du
Fig. 13. Bernardino Genga and Charles Errard, Borghese Gladiator, in Anatomia per uso et intelligenza del disegno..., Rome, 1691, plate 47, engraving, Getty Research Institute Library, Los Angeles
the
combattant, applicable aux beaux arts…, Paris, 1812, plate 6, engraving, McGill University Library, Montreal
15.
Fig.
Bosq
Jean-Galbert Salvage, Anatomy of
Borghese Gladiator,
gladiateur
Fig.
Jean-Galbert Salvage, Écorché of the Borghese Gladiator, 1804, plaster, h. 157 cm, École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris (no. MU 11927)
Fig. 14. Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, Proportions de la Statue d’Antinoüs, in Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des metiers. Recueil de planches…, vol. 3 (II.2), Dessin, plate XXXIV, Paris, 1763, engraving, Smithsonian Libraries, Washington, DC
Bucephalus, the Apollo Belvedere, the head of the Farnese Hercules, the head of Menelaus (from the Pasquino), and the head of one of the daughters in the Niobe Group. On the right tray is the Dying Gladiator.
Fig. 4. John Cheere (attr.), Diane Chasseresse, 1744, lead painted white, 213.5 cm, Stourhead, Wiltshire (NT 562880.1)
Fig. 5. Workshop of Michel Anguier or Martin Desjardins, Diane Chasseresse, 1775, bronze, h. 52 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris (no. OA 5084)
Fig. 22. Saxone Shoes advertisement in the Daily Telegraph, 13 October 1947, p. 6, British Library, London
Fig. 23. Spinario, in Le Magasin Pittoresque, vol. 4, no. 34, Brussels, 1836, p. 269, private collection, Bonn
Fig. 24. Max Ernst, Oedipe, in Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution, no. 5, Paris, May 1933, private collection, Bonn
Fig. 14. Horace Walpole and William Kent (design), James Francis Verskovis and Giovanni Battista Pozzo (ivories), The Walpole Cabinet (the ivory oval with the Farnese Flora right top centre; also left top centre the Farnese Hercules, and right centre left Caracalla), 1743, 152.4 × 91.5 cm,Victoria and Albert Museum, London (no. W.52:1, 2-1925)
Fig. 49. Anonymous French artist, Allusion aux trames ministerielles. Qui ne connoit le groupe célèbre de Laocoon?, 1790, etching, aquatint, and coloured engraving, 34.3 × 25.7 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris (no. L 489 LR/129 Recto)
Fig. 50. Honoré Daumier, Imité du groupe de Laocoon, in Le Charivari, 6 April 1868, lithograph on newsprint, second state of two, 29.8 × 28.5 cm (sheet), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (no. 48.117.13)
52. Nixon entangled by the White House Tapes during the Watergate scandal, front cover of Newsweek, 28 January 1974, British Library, London
Fig. 51. Charles Addams, Illustration in the New Yorker, 7 April 1975, British Library, London
Fig.