Giacobbe Giusti, Roman gladiator helmet
Roman gladiator helmet from Pompeii, Italy, 1st century AD
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Museum#Department_of_Greece_and_Rome
Category Archives: ’ first century B.C.
Giacobbe Giusti, Pergamon and the Hellenistic Kingdoms of the Ancient World’
Giacobbe Giusti, ‘Pergamon and the Hellenistic Kingdoms of the Ancient World’
Crayton Sohan of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, left, and Wolfgang Massmann, head stone conservator from the Antikensammlung, Berlin, position the head of an immense 10-foot-tall marble statue of Athena. Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY
Giacobbe Giusti, ‘Pergamon and the Hellenistic Kingdoms of the Ancient World’
A fragment of the colossal sculpture “Head of a Youth” is among the ancient art works on display at the Met’s exhibition of Hellenistic art.Credit Photograph courtesy the Met Museum
Giacobbe Giusti, ‘Pergamon and the Hellenistic Kingdoms of the Ancient World’
The Borghese Krater. Greek, Late Hellenistic period, 40-30 B.C. Marble RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY
Giacobbe Giusti, ‘Pergamon and the Hellenistic Kingdoms of the Ancient World’
Statue of a Roman General (The Tivoli General). Roman, Late period, ca. 80-60 B.C. Marble Soprintendenza Speciale per i Beni Archeologici di Roma
Mass Invasion of Greek Art Comes to the New York Met
The rare treasures of the Pergamon Museum in Berlin will be on display
By
The Pergamon Museum in Berlin houses one of the world’s leading collection of antiquities. But World War II badly damaged the building—bullet holes from large-caliber machine guns still pockmark it—and it’s finally in the early stages of a much-needed renovation. “The building was absolutely rotten,” said Dr. Andreas Scholl, the director of the Staatliche, the museum and research group that oversees the Pergamon. “The fire brigade kept threatening to close the entire place.” Most of the museum will stay closed, with the collection off limits to the public, until 2019.
For New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the rotting of the Pergamon gave it a rare opportunity to get its hands on the some of the most prized objects of the Hellenistic period. Next week, the Met will open one of the most ambitious exhibitions of Greek art in the museum’s history, “Pergamon and the Hellenistic Kingdoms of the Ancient World.” At the heart of the show are 73 pieces on loan from the Pergamon. “We lent very, very liberally,” said Dr. Scholl.
Experts say “Pergamon” is the first major-museum show to focus on the art of the Hellenistic period, which dates from the death of Alexander the Great in 323 B.C. to the suicide of Cleopatra in 30 B.C. The exhibition, which opens Monday and closes July 17, will not travel outside of New York.
Pergamon, in modern day Turkey, was one of the wealthiest cities of the ancient world, coming into its own as Athens was in decline and before the rise of Rome. “It is one of the top-five hit-parade ancient cities,” said Mr. Picón.
For the past six years, Mr. Picón and his staff have made dozens of trips to nearly 50 museums in 12 countries, pulling together loans for the blockbuster show.
One of the most dramatic pieces they were able to borrow is an Athena statue that weighs over three tons. It was shipped in three sections from the Pergamon in Berlin and carefully reassembled in the Met galleries.
The Hellenistic period is a challenging time for art historians. It is not marked by a single school of artistic development, and artists worked in many styles with many materials. So instead of having a thematic show, the Met focused on what the museum trade calls “an objects show.”
The galleries are filled with exquisite ancient glass, opulent jewelry, engraved cameos, mosaics, lifelike bronze sculptures and dramatic marble statues. Many have never traveled to the U.S. before. “I can’t claim that every single object is the best of its type, because I would be boasting,” said Mr. Picón, but “this is the top 1% of what has survived in terms of quality.”
Crayton Sohan of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, left, and Wolfgang Massmann, head stone conservator from the Antikensammlung, Berlin, position the head of an immense 10-foot-tall marble statue of Athena. Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY
Mr. Picón—who speaks five languages and has a reading knowledge of ancient Greek and Latin—did his undergraduate work at Haverford and Bryn Mawr colleges and got his Ph.D. from Oxford University. He grew up in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and when he announced his plan to become an art historian, specializing in Greek art, his businessman father, speaking on behalf of parents around the world, was taken aback by the impracticality of the profession. Mr. Picón recalls that his father then added, “You could at least have done pre-Columbian art.”
Touring the Met galleries last week as the Met installers put the finishing touches on the show, Mr. Picón was in a state of high excitement. Pausing before a marble Alexander in the first room of the exhibition, he declared it “the most beautiful Alexander, at the height of his youth.” A nearby small bronze of Hercules was “the best.”
In a nearby gallery he paused before “a spectacular” piece of ancient glass. “You would walk a mile to see something like this,” Mr. Picón said. Even the damaged pieces were perfect. Admiring a marble head that was split in half, he said, “If you had to break it, you couldn’t break it better!” Stopping before a glass plate borrowed from the British Museum, the curator exclaimed, “It’s a glass of staggering quality—one of the best pieces in the world.”
He delights in the tiny details, pointing out an Eros admiring himself in the mirror on a tiny plaster cast.
Mr. Picón is mischievous as well. One prone statue is displayed so that its shapely backside greets the approaching viewer. “You get a nice surprise when you walk around,” he said. The piece turns out to be a hermaphrodite. One of the workers installing the statue, he said, “went white” after discovering the statue’s dual nature.
Write to Eben Shapiro at eben.shapiro@wsj.com
http://www.wsj.com/articles/mass-invasion-of-greek-art-comes-to-the-new-york-met-1460568224
Giacobbe Giusti, Bronze Sculpture Discovered in Georgia Goes on Display in Los Angeles
Giacobbe Giusti, Bronze Sculpture Discovered in Georgia Goes on Display in Los Angeles
An ancient statue dating back to the Bronze Age and discovered in Georgia goes on a display among the ancient world’s masterpieces in Los Angeles.
After the long term collaboration of the Georgian National Museum and J. Paul Getty Museum unidentified bronze statue named Torso of a Youth dated 2nd – 1st century BC, discovered in Vani settlement, wester Georgia were available to go on a display at the exhibition in the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.
A major exhibition named Power and Pathos: Bronze Sculpture of the Hellenistic World was open at the Los Angeles Getty Museum on July 28 and will last until November 1.
Before moving to Los Angeles, following exhibition was presented at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence and after Getty Museum, exposition will move to the National Gallery of Art in Washington.
Other pieces which are exhibited at the Los Angeles Getty Museum are from world’s leading ancient museums, such are the British Museum in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Galleria degli Uffizi and the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Florence, the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Naples, the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, the Musйe du Louvre in Paris, and the Vatican Museums.
The exhibition in Los Angeles is organized by the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi in Florence and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, with the participation of the Tuscany’s directorate general for archaeology and it represents one of the largest expositions of this kind.
National Museum of Georgia is temporary housing of the statue, but as soon as Otar Lordkipanidze Vani Museum-Reserve will finish its large scale reconstruction works in 2016 the bronze torso of a youth will be returned at the original place.
Georgian National Museum currently takes part in one of the most important international cultural event. From 14 March to 21 June 2015, Palazzo Strozzi in Florence is hosting a major exhibition entitled “Power and Pathos”. Bronze Sculpture of the Hellenistic World, devised and produced in conjunction with the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the Soprintendenza per i Beni Archeologici della Toscana, Tuscany’s directorate general for archaeology. The exhibition showcases a host of outstanding examples of bronze sculpture to tell the story of the spectacular artistic developments of the Hellenistic era (4th to 1st centuries BCE).
The exhibition hosts some of the most important masterpieces of the ancient world from many of the world’s leading archaeological museums including the British Museum in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Galleria degli Uffizi and the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Florence, the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Naples, the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, the Musée du Louvre in Paris, the Vatican Museums and the Georgian National Museum, which represented bronze torso of a youth dated 2nd – 1st century BC, discovered in Vani settlement (Georgia).
Participation at the exhibition is due to the long term collaboration of Georgian National Museum and J. Paul Getty Museum. After the exhibition at Palazzo Strozzi, all exponents will be showcased at the National Gallery of Art in Washington and J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles in 2016.
As soon as Georgian National Museum Otar Lordkipanidze Vani Museum-Reserve will finish its large scale reconstructive works, bronze torso of a youth will be returned at the original place.
http://museum.ge/index.php?lang_id=ENG&sec_id=72&info_id=13315
Giacobbe Giusti, ‘Augustus’
Giacobbe Giusti, ‘Augustus’
Augusto di Via Labicana
Portrait of Augustus as Pontifex Maximus, statue created post-12 BCE.
Because there are entire books and web sites devoted to portraits of Augustus, I have included here only the portrait most similar to Augustus’ portrait on the Ara Pacis. The image on the Ara Pacis is a relief showing Augustus in a procession, whereas the Via Labicana Augustus is a fully rounded, free-standing statue of Augustus alone. Yet both are approximately life-size portraits of the entire figure, showing Augustus in his role as Pontifex Maximus, the highest religious office, robed, his head veiled for a sacrifice. In both, his right hand is extended, possibly holding a patera, a sacrificial cup or offering plate. In both portraits, Augustus is represented in a classicising Greek style rather than with the remarkable verism of the most original Roman portraits. In both Augustus face is slightly more mature than in his most youthful portraits.
Although the carving of the body and toga are merely conventional, a standard workshop job, carved from a large block of Italian Luna marble, the head is the work of a master, one of the most refined examples of Augustan portrait carving. The head and remnant of a forearm are carved from more expensive Greek marble, giving a warmer tone to Augustus’ complexion. In comparison with other portraits of Augustus, the head is slightly too small for the body. In some of the photographs below, the separateness of the finely carved neck from the surrounding robe is clear.
This slightly over-life-size statue was rediscovered in 1910 on the slopes of Oppian Hill in the Via Labicana. It is now handsomely displayed in the Palazzo Massimo alle Terme of the National Museum of Rome.
Perceptive readings of this portrait in the evolution of Augustus’ portrait types are given by Galinsky (1996, pp.164-179) and Kleiner (1992).
1000 gray-scale photographs of portrait sculpture of Augustus, most of the highest professional quaity, with authoritative text and catalogue, are reproduced in Boschung, 1993.
250 some photos of “Sculpted Portraits of Augustus” are available on Joe Geranio’s photostream.
 Via Labicana Augustus
photo May 2010 |
 Via Labicana Augustus
photo May 2010 |
 Via Labicana Augustus
photo May 2010 |
Via Labicana Augustus photo May 2010 |
Via Labicana Augustus photo May 2010
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Via Labicana Augustus
photo May 2010 |
 Typically, Augustus’ portrait has almond shaped eyes, an aquiline nose, and rounded mouth.
photo May 2010 |
 The most distinctive feature of most portraits of Augustus are the pincer-like locks on his forehead.
photo May 2010 |
 Typically, Augustus’ head is shaped from a broad cranium to a narrow chin.
photo May 2010 |
 Via Labicana Augustus
photo May 2010 |
 Via Labicana Augustus
photo May 2010 |
 Via Labicana Augustus
photo May 2010 |
http://cdm.reed.edu/ara-pacis/altar/related-material/portrait-of-augustus/
Giacobbe Giusti, Apollo of Piombino
Giacobbe Giusti, Apollo of Piombino
In 1977 a similar statue of an archaising Apollo was found at Pompeii in the villa of C. Julius Polybius, and based on photographs the two were soon ‘associated’ … the slight scandal of the Pompeian piece is that it was excavated with tendrils which probably held a wooden tray, and so its nature as a piece of decorative furniture in a fancy Roman house could not be denied.
Apollo of Piombino
Lithograph of the Piombino Apollo from Bulfinch Mythology, 1908
The Apollo of Piombino or the Piombino Boy is a famous Greek bronze statuette[1] in late Archaic style that depicts the god as a kouros or youth, or it may be a worshipper bringing an offering.[2] The bronze is inlaid with copper for the boy’s lips, eyebrows and nipples. The eyes, which are missing, were of another material, perhaps bone or ivory.
It was found in 1832 at Piombino (Roman Populonia), in Etruria, in the harbor off the southwest point and was purchased for the Musée du Louvre in 1834. Its archaic style led scholars like Reinhard Lullies and Max Hirmer[3] to date it in the 5th century BCE and place its facture in Magna Graecia, the Hellenic culture area of southern Italy; Kenneth Clark illustrated it in The Nude (1956),[4] Karl Schefold included it in Meisterwerke Griechischer Kunst 1960[5] and casts of it were to be found in university and museum study collections; one made by the Louvre has been returned to Piombino.[6] Instead, B.S. Ridgeway (Ridgeway 1967) proved it to be— not simply an archaising sculpture of the 1st century BCE, of the kind designed to appeal to a Roman with refined tastes— but a consciously fabricated Roman forgery, with a false inlaid inscription of silver in archaic lettering on the left leg. The inscription dedicates this Apollo to Athena, an anomaly.[7] The two sculptors responsible could not resist secreting inside the sculpture a lead tag inscribed with their names, which was found when the sculpture was conserved in 1842.[7] One was a Tyrian émigré to Rhodes. The Louvre’s website adds that a comparable work uncovered in 1977 in Pompeii, in the villa of C. Julius Polybius, corroborates the hypothesis of an archaising pastiche, made for a Roman client in the 1st century BCE.[7]
The study of ancient Greek sculpture in the last decades has moved away from the traditional practice of identifying sculptures based on brief literary descriptions and attempting to recognize the characteristic manner of some famous names as reflected in reproductions of their work and variants based on their style, to concentrate instead on the socio-political world in which sculpture was created and other less subjective criteria.[8]
- 1.15 m.
- The latter suggestion is made, for example, by Jaś Elsner, “Reflections of the ‘Greek Revolution’ in art”, in Simon Goldhill and Robin Osborne, eds. Rethinking Revolutions Through Ancient Greece 2006:71; of the bronze ephebe found in the House of the Bronze Ephebe, and identified by Dorothy Kent Hill as having held a lamp (Hill, “Roman domestic garden sculpture”, in Elisabeth B. MacDougall, et al., Ancient Roman Gardens 1981:89); Hill observes “today we can recognize many lamp-bearers of the same ephebe type”, instancing the Apollo of Piombino first among others.
- Lullies and Hirmer, Greek Sculpture, 1960.
- Clark, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form, 1960, fig 23, p. 60; Clark expressed his reserves with the sculpture in his text, but attributed the “uneasiness” to its archaic stiffness.
- Plate 235.
- According to Thomas Hoving, False Impressions: the hunt for big-time art fakes 1996:34; Hoving quotes his previously unpublished impressions of first viewing the Apollo in the early 1960s: “…a simpering Cupid…. the stomach is a muddy landscape of flesh…”
- Musée du Louvre: Apollo of Piombino.
- Brunilde Sismondo Ridgway characterized the new directions scholarship in this field was taking in “The Study of Ancient Sculpture” American Journal of Archaeology 86.2 (April 1982), pp. 155-157. A response and dialogue appeared in William Hood, “In Defense of Art History: A Response to Brunilde Ridgway” The Art Bulletin 68.3 (September 1986), pp. 480-482, with a rejoinder by Mrs Ridgeway.
http://phdiva.blogspot.it/2015/03/hellenistic-bronzes-pride-and-prejudices.html
Giacobbe Giusti: Jens M Daehner and Kenneth Lapatin, the co-curators of Power and Pathos
Giacobbe Giusti: Jens M Daehner and Kenneth Lapatin, the co-curators of Power and Pathos
1. Head of Athlete Holding a Strigil (Ephebe Apoxyomenos from Ephesos),
AD 1-50. 205cm x 78.7cm x 77.5cm. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.
Jens M Daehner and Kenneth Lapatin, the co-curators of Power and Pathos: Bronze Sculpture of the Hellenistic World, explain the thinking behind their stunning
new exhibition
In the winter of 2000, two bronze statues in the Berlin Antikensammlung, the so-called Praying Boy and the headless Salamis Youth, were joined by two other bronzes lent from Florence and Los Angeles, the statue of an ephebe called the Idolino and the victorious athlete known as the Getty Bronze. They had been brought to Germany to undergo scientific testing at the Federal Institute for Materials Research and Testing (Bundesanstalt für Materialprüfung, BAM), particularly CT scanning to measure and visualise the thickness of the casts. While they were there, the curators in Berlin seized the rare opportunity to display these four sculptures, two Greek and two Roman, side by side in the rotunda of the Altes Museum.
2. Bronze portrait head of a man,
1st century BC. 29.5cm x 21.6cm x 21.6cm.
The J Paul Getty Museum, Villa Collection.
3. Ephebe (Idolino from Pesaro) circa 30 BC, bronze with copper inlays and lead. National Archaeological Museum, Florence.
4. Apollo-Kouros, 1st century BC to 1st century AD, bronze, copper, bone, dark stone, glass.
128cm x 33cm x 38cm.
5. The head of Apollo-Kouros.Soprintendenza Speciale per i Beni Archeologici di Pompei.
The coming together of four life-size male nudes in bronze was unprecedented, inviting direct comparison – exploration without scientific equipment – in which topics such as the body as rendered in bronze, various depictions of age and degrees of realism, and the Classical versus classicising, all powerfully came to the fore. The two Greek athletes from around 300 BC and the two Roman youths of the Augustan age, produced three centuries later, made a quartet framing the beginning and the end of the Hellenistic epoch, yet depicting
very much the same subject in the same medium. This temporary installation in Berlin also highlighted persistent challenges in comparing large-scale ancient bronzes: as rare survivors from antiquity, they usually exist in ‘splendid isolation’ at their home institutions, which seldom possess more than one in their collections. Such statues are usually granted a questionable status as unique masterpieces of ancient art. This means being able to see and study more than one or two bronze sculptures at a time is exceptional, but in our exhibition visitors are able to do just that.
Marble sculpture, by contrast, exists in relative abundance, filling galleries and storerooms in museums worldwide. There is a solid, highly evolved set of critical methods for comparing and making sense of marbles, based on the quantity of available specimens and centuries of perceptive experience with the medium that is shared by lay and expert viewers. An equivalent ‘toolbox’ for seeing and understanding bronze statues in direct juxtaposition does not exist, or, simply put, we lack the familiarity of seeing them side by side. This affects not only aesthetic questions such as the assessment of style, but also the interpretation of bronze-specific surface phenomena such as corrosion, intentional patinas – both ancient and modern – and the cleaning methods employed in earlier restorations.
One of bronze’s principal characteristics is that, like any metal, it can be melted down and reused. Ancient bronze statues therefore survive in numbers far smaller than their counterparts in more dur-able marble. In fact, with the exception of very few sculptures that seem never to have been lost and subsequently recovered, the ancient bronze images that are so greatly admired today have been preserved largely by chance – whether they were discovered accidentally or unearthed during carefully planned and executed scientific excavations. Given the law of supply and demand, the rarity of ancient bronzes has elevated their value and status. So, although scarce in museum galleries, they are prevalent both in our textbooks and in popular consciousness.
Greek and Latin literary sources and the fact that bronzes were transported as booty, but also as scrap, leave no doubt that the statues were valued. But were they valued more highly than those fashioned from other materials? Certainlynot more than images of gold and ivory, whose materials alone placed them in a different class altogether. But since the Renaissance, when scholars sought to connect surviving artefacts with works mentioned in ancient texts, bronze statues have come to be prized as ‘originals’, frequently in contrast to marble ‘copies’, and they have frequently been considered Greek rather than Roman.
6. Bronze statuette of Alexander the Great on horseback, 1st century BC. 49cm x 47cm x 29cm. National Archaeological Museum, Naples.
There are several paradoxes here: first, the devaluing of marble, which was a primary, natural, local medium for the Greeks and always had to be carved by hand. Second, and more significantly, that bronze, a material that lends itself to the serial reproduction of similar, if not identical statues through the use of moulds and the indirect lost-wax technique, should be regarded as the premier material for the creation of unique, original works of art.
Such is the allure of ancient bronzes that there has been an irresistible urge among scholars to attribute them to famous sculptors – a trend that continues to this day in an almost predictable pattern: the head of a boxer from Olympia has been attributed to Silanion; the Getty Athlete and the Terme Boxer, both to Lysippos; and the Mazara Satyr declared to be an original by Praxiteles. The latest example is the bronze version of the Apollo Sauroktonos in Cleveland, also believed by some to have been cast by Praxiteles himself, or at least by
his workshop.
Indeed, scholars hardly agree on what distinguishes a direct from an indirect casting or how to determine whether surface details were executed in the wax or as part of the cold work after casting. Yet these distinctions are often considered particularly important in the hope of establishing how original a given bronze is, and deemed crucial in any effort to find Greek sculptural ‘originals’.
The number of statue bases whose cuttings indicate that they supported bronze statues preserved in cities and sanctuaries across the Mediterranean world certainly demonstrates the popularity and status of bronze as a medium, as do their inscriptions and other ancient documents recording with varying specificity what achievements those depicted had accomplished or benefactions they had granted in order to merit such
an honour.
7. Bronze head of Apollo, 1st century BC to 1st century AD. 51cm x 40cm x 38cm. Provincial Archaeological Museum, Salerno.
But was bronze always to be preferred over marble? Surviving statues demonstrate that Hellenistic marble carvers were no less skilled than their colleagues who modelled wax and cast bronze, even if the inherent characteristics of bronze, including its greater tensile strength, allowed sculptors to achieve dramatic visual effects less readily realised in other materials. Marbles, too, were enhanced by added colour, and extreme poses could be depicted.
The truth of the matter is that throughout antiquity marble appears to have remained the preferred material for images of gods, for funerary statues, and, as we might expect, for architectural sculpture. But in the Hellenistic period, as the social currency of honorific statuary became even more important than it had been in preceding centuries, bronze became pre-eminent, and the metal contributed its own economic, mythological, and ideological qualities to its unique physical ones.
Exaggerated or not, the fact that Lysippos is credited with having made 1500 bronze statues (Pliny, Natural History, 34.37), of which not one has survived, is a cogent reminder of the known unknowns regarding bronze sculpture at the very outset of the Hellenistic period. More than a Socratic statement of ignorance, the empty statue base from Corinth – inscribed with the name of Lysippos and with cuttings for the feet of a bronze figure – emphasises not only the pervasive loss of Hellenistic bronze statuary, but also the difficulties of reconstructing the original functions of those works that have survived in secondary if not tertiary contexts such as shipwrecks, warehouses, or intentional burials. Wherever statues have escaped re-melting and recycling, the ancient markets for art and metal have often ‘interfered’ in their lives and thus complicated the record. Ironically, it is largely due to the trade in works of art – and the accidents that occurred during such transitions – that bronzes have survived at all.
The relatively small corpus of large-scale Hellenistic bronze sculptures known today has grown slowly but steadily over the past centuries. To this day, however, there is no comprehensive survey of the material, comprising physical, iconographical, and textual evidence. Despite manageable quantities of works and fragments, the obvious challenges lie in defining ‘large scale’ and identifying what belongs to the Hellenistic period, including the vexed question of what may be casts of earlier models or Roman casts after Hellenistic models.
Our exhibition, Power and Pathos: Bronze Sculpture of the Hellenistic World, features both Hellenistic works and Roman bronzes in a Hellenistic tradition, including some representative medium and small-scale examples. So it seems worthwhile to offer some historiographical perspective and mention some of the landmark discoveries that have shaped our current knowledge and understanding of Hellenistic bronze statuary.
Excavated in the 1750s, the Villa dei Papiri at Herculaneum has yielded the largest number of ancient bronzes ever found at a single site and almost overnight catapulted the study of bronzes from antiquarian pastime to art-historical discipline. Outnumbering the villa’s marble statuary by a ratio of almost 3:1 (63:22), the bronzes belonged to the superlative sculpture collection of late-Republican and Augustan patrons, which included statues and herm busts of gods, heroes, and athletes; portraits of rulers, citizens, and intellectuals as well as animal sculptures and small-scale fountain decorations. Many of these are replicas of opera nobilia of Classical Greek art; others, particularly some of the portraits, reproduce works of the Hellenistic period, yet there are also creations in the Archaic and Severe styles of the early 5th century BC: not actual ‘antiques’ but deliberate imitations, if not outright forgeries. The decorative programme of the villa thus encapsulates many of the aspects relevant to research into Hellenistic bronze explored in this exhibition: replication, imitation, retrospective styles, originality, and the challenges of dating, as well as the tradition of Hellenistic art in a 1st-century BC Roman context.
When two over-life-size statues, known today as the Terme Ruler and the Terme Boxer, were discovered on the Quirinal hill in 1885, it immediately became clear that they survived intact not by chance, but because they were – for reasons still unknown – carefully deposited in antiquity. The find, if not the circumstances of burial, illuminates the fate of many Greek bronzes that were removed from their original locations and transferred to Italy, beginning with the Roman conquests of the Eastern Mediterranean in the mid-2nd century BC. Although we can easily imagine the Quirinal bronzes installed in a Greek sanctuary or civic space, we can only speculate about their function and display in Rome. They may have been part of the city’s collection of Greek works of art, admired by Romans much as we admire them today. In fact, nothing associates these two Greek bronzes within their new cultural context beyond their extraordinary artistic and conceptual qualities. Since the moment of their discovery, the ruler’s heroic image of power and the boxer’s graphically rendered pathos have helped crystallise in the modern mind two paramount phenomena of Hellenistic art.
Like many bronzes found underwater in the Mediterranean, the cache of statues found – on land – at Athens’ port, Piraeus, in 1959 were sculptures in transition. Packed tightly together in two crates, the five bronzes – Athena, Apollo-Kouros, two statues of Artemis, and a tragic mask – must have been destined for shipment from a warehouse in the ancient harbour that burned down in the early 1st century BC. The group highlights the existence of a vibrant market for Greek bronzes, yet how old exactly they are in this case has not been properly determined. The Apollo in Archaic style, now considered a Hellenistic creation, if not an actual Archaic bronze, is the extreme in the group, while the goddesses have been dated either on the face value of their style (with little consideration that they could be bronze copies of older works) or as contemporary casts of a single commission. Regrettably, since their discovery 56 years ago, the Piraeus bronzes have not been systematically analysed or had their casting techniques examined.
But the seductive opportunities to look inside the hollow-cast bronzes with endoscopes and through their walls with x-rays have, at least for a time, sidelined efforts to make sense of their exteriors and of the medium’s specific aesthetics. We know a lot about the chemistry of man-made alloys, minute details of casting, cold-working, and repairs, but still very little about bronze’s role in artistic development, how its use impacted style, or why it was chosen for particular subjects, genres, or iconographic categories. That bronze as an artistic medium has been studied largely from a technological point of view, perhaps more so than other metals, has to do with its complex metallurgy as a copper alloy and the sophistication of the casting process.
8. Bronze portrait head of Arsinoë III Philopator, late 3rd century to early 2nd century BC.
30cm x 20cm x 30cm. Civic Museum, Palazzo Te, Mantua.
Rarely, however, has technical or analytical data allowed us to narrow the date of a bronze sculpture beyond what could be – and mostly had been already – established on stylistic grounds. In no period of Greek and Roman art is this more apparent than in the Hellenistic age: some of the period’s signature bronze sculptures can be placed, with persuasive stylistic arguments, at various points within a 300-year window spanning the entire period, while none of the intensive scientific investigations have yielded viable arguments in favour of an earlier or later date. Like certain styles in Hellenistic sculpture, bronze-casting technologies cannot (so far) be pinned to particular phases or excluded from others within this long period. Even less so once we recognise that some artists not only imitated earlier styles but also chose old-fashioned techniques. Thus the three Hellenistic artists who left their names on lead tablets inside the Piombino Apollo fashioned their statue, basically an Archaic kouros, with copper inlays for the eyebrows – a typical treatment for Archaic bronzes – and silver inlays for the antiquated letters of the dedicatory inscription.
Either our data on the alloys and techniques of Hellenistic bronze sculpture is too limited for making better distinctions, or the casting process and other metallurgical traditions did not change all that much during the period. So unless the decision is between an actual Archaic bronze and an archaistic cast 500 years younger, many analytical test results are found to be merely ‘not inconsistent’ with a Hellenistic attribution of the object
in question.
Of course, technological and metallurgical diagnostics ought not to be reduced to the issue of chronology or authenticity: we do understand bronze sculptures better because the analytical lens allows us to comprehend how they were made. As mentioned above, this kind of manufacturing data, like simple measurements, is increasingly becoming part of the common infrastructure for the serious study of ancient bronzes. Yet the investigations could go significantly further when the methodical juxtaposition of actual works – through loans, exhibitions, or parallel conservation treatments – creates opportunities for comparative inquiries, generating and fuelling future analytical questions. In fact, some recent and current analytical explorations already go hand in hand with a new art-historical interest in the aesthetics of bronze surfaces.
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9. Herm of Dionysos (Getty Herm), from the workshop of Boëthos of Kalchedon, bronze, copper, calcitic stone, 2nd century BC. 103cm x 23.5cm x 19.5cm. The J Paul Getty Museum, Villa Collection.
The challenges of chronology in Hellenistic sculpture often seem to get compounded when dealing with bronze. In our exhibition, the artworks follow only a broad chronological framework: the image of Alexander – represented not by a contemporary bronze portrait (which has not survived) but by a 1st-century BC equestrian statuette – and portraits of subsequent rulers, among which only the heads of Arsinoë III and Seuthes III of Thrace are plausibly (though not indisputably) identified and hence dated.
The subsequent thematic sections each cut across time and geography. Their topics are a blend of iconographical and aesthetic categories – portraiture, the body, realism, imitation, and replication – setting up a framework to correlate bronze sculpture to cultural trends, artistic tendencies, and stylistic developments in the Hellenistic age. The idea is to identify and describe phenomena specific to bronze and to bring out what bronze as a medium contributes to the period’s sculpture, be it as a vehicle for tradition or a catalyst for change. How are the expression and the expressiveness of portraits impacted by the use of bronze as opposed to marble? How do surface finishes, such as patinas or polychrome details, affect the question of realism?
Particular emphasis is placed on the aspect of replication. The one phenomenon that distinguishes bronze from other media is its reproducibility through casting. Several examples of multiple versions of the same statue are shown in the catalogue, the extraordinary case being the Apoxyomenos of the Ephesos type, for whom there are three bronze versions, all of them probably late Hellenistic or early Roman Imperial copies of a 4th-century BC athlete holding a strigil. The number of bronze replicas extant has now compelled experts to reassess that
work’s attribution.
Bringing these three bronzes together for the first time in the exhibition will provide an opportunity for comparative study, looking not only at casting and finishing techniques, but also at proportions, details, and styles in order to understand the bronzes’ relation both to one another and to their obviously famous prototype. The two herms of Dionysos, one of which is signed by the 2nd-century BC sculptor Boëthos of Kalchedon, may present a case of multiples produced by the same workshop. The evidence is less clear on this issue for the two archaistic Apollo-Kouroi from Piombino and Pompeii. Although often compared in print, till now neither of these two pairs has previously been displayed side by side.
The idealised sculptures, Idolinos such as the Florentine statue, were made around the time of Augustus, reproducing, refashioning, and sometimes mixing the severe and high-Classical styles of Greek sculpture in the 5th century BC. The Vani torso from ancient Colchis – cast in a local workshop, probably at the height of the Hellenistic period, but in the early Classical idiom of at least 300 years earlier – reminds us that Classicism and other retrospective modes of representation are neither Roman inventions nor exclusive to Italy. Established in Hellenistic art, they fed into the taste for what looks like a Greek revival at the very beginning of the Roman Empire. Bronze certainly was the material of choice that made this period an early ‘age of mechanical reproduction’.
Giacobbe Giusti, Power and Pathos
Giacobbe Giusti, Power and Pathos
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
Blockbuster ‘Power and Pathos’ Exhibit to Open in Florence
An extensive new show brings together 50 ancient bronze masterpieces
By
Is it possible that the apotheosis of Western sculpture was achieved over 2,000 years ago and it’s been all downhill since then? A new blockbuster exhibit, ‘Power and Pathos: Bronze Sculpture of the Hellenistic World,’ strongly buttresses this view.
Greek bronzes hold a rarified place in the art world, both in terms of quality and scarcity. Most Greek sculpture that has survived is carved from marble. In ancient times, however, bronze was more highly prized and served as the material of choice for the wealthiest patrons and most skilled artists. Unfortunately, bronze was also easily melted down for recycling and most pieces have been lost to time and history. Carol C. Mattusch, a bronze expert at George Mason University, estimates that “There are probably fewer than 200 ancient large-scale bronzes, Greek and Roman, unless you want to count an arm here and a leg there.”
So it’s a remarkable curatorial achievement that ‘Power and Pathos’ brings together 50 or so of the most spectacular surviving masterpieces in one exhibit. The show opens March 14 at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, before moving to the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles in July and then the National Gallery of Art in Washington in December. Classical scholars and sculpture lovers are abuzz over the breadth of the show, declaring it one of those rare museum shows that is worth getting on a plane to see. Adding to the allure of the show, many of the pieces have an exciting back-story: a number have been discovered by fisherman or divers at the bottom of the sea. One of the newer stars of the show is the first century B.C. Croatian Apoxyomenos, or Statue of an Athlete, discovered at a depth of about 150 feet in 1997 in the Northern Adriatic off the coast of Croatia. It is largely intact, making it one of the most striking underwater discoveries of the last 20 years. Indeed, from a preservationist’s point of view, the best thing that could happen to a Greek bronze is that it was lost at sea in a shipwreck or buried in a landslide or earthquake.
The works in the show come from “thirty-four museums in thirteen countries on four continents who have entrusted us with many of their most celebrated treasures,” according to the exhibition catalog.
The show is a veritable Murderers’ Row of Greek bronzes, pieces that have been famous for centuries, including the Terme Boxer, from Rome, Sleeping Eros, from New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and Boy with Thorn, also from Rome. The piece also contains some memorable newer discoveries that have never traveled before. The Getty, which was the driving force behind the exhibition, custom-built specially reinforced shipping crates for the different works and provided them to the different museums for transport.
Large-scale ancient bronzes rarely come to market and the works in the show are literally priceless. In 2007, an anonymous bidder paid about $28 million for a bronze Artemis and the Stag. Using that as a rough, crude measure, there is about $1.5 billion worth of ancient art in the show. Timothy Potts, director of the J. Paul Getty Museum, declines to put a dollar amount on the art in the show, but notes that the Artemis piece was a Roman bronze, and thus had a “frankly lower” value than the older Greek bronzes in the show.
Not every piece will travel to every location on the tour. For instance, the Getty Bronze, a statue of a naked youth crowning himself with a wreath (300-100 B.C.), is claimed by Italy. Mr. Potts says the piece will travel to D.C., but not to Italy. “It’s an object that’s still going through the court system in Italy,” he says. Unlike other pieces that the Getty returned to Greece and Italy for lacking proper title, the Getty says that the bronze was found in international waters and Italy has no legal claim to the piece. A spokesman for Italy’s Culture Ministry said that Italy still claims the statue and that it is currently awaiting a ruling by Italy’s highest appeal’s court. Despite the one contested piece, the Getty and a number of Italian museums are working closely on the exhibit.
The exhibit focuses on works made in the Hellenistic age versus the earlier Classical period, which portrayed subjects in an idealized fashion—godlike rulers and athletes with unattainable abs and cheek bones, much like a fashion magazine cover. The art in the show dates roughly from the death of Alexander the Great (323 B.C.) to the ascent of Rome over Greece in the first century A.D., when artists began to make their work more life-like and individualistic. The Getty’s Mr. Potts argues that the sculptures of that period are the “most life-like and emotionally charged ever made, and still one of the highpoints of European art history.”
http://www.wsj.com/articles/blockbuster-power-and-pathos-exhibit-to-open-in-florence-1426093935
The Boxer is filled with pathos. The bruised, aging fighter has a broken nose, battered ears and blood and sweat dripping from his body. The hyperrealism and emotional content of these pieces has an electrifying impact on contemporary audiences. When the Boxer was on loan to the Met in 2013, guards had to constantly stop people from impulsively touching the statue.
Other pieces show wild beards, crow’s feet and other wrinkles, veins and tendons. “The head of the man from Delos is one of the great examples of individual portraiture from any era,” says Jens M. Daehner, one of the curators of the show. “It really embodies our modern idea of what a portrait is—something that originated in Hellenistic time.”
http://www.wsj.com/articles/blockbuster-power-and-pathos-exhibit-to-open-in-florence-1426093935
Giacobbe Giusti, Capitoline Wolf
Giacobbe Giusti, Capitoline Wolf
Capitoline Wolf
 |
|
| Year | 13th and late 15th century AD |
|---|---|
| Type | Bronze |
| Dimensions | 75 cm × 114 cm (30 in × 45 in) |
| Location | Musei Capitolini, Rome, Italy |
The Capitoline Wolf (Italian: Lupa Capitolina) is a bronze sculpture of a she-wolf suckling twin human infants, inspired by the legend of the founding of Rome. According to the legend, when Numitor, grandfather of the twins Romulus and Remus, was overthrown by his brother Amulius, the usurper ordered the twins to be cast into the Tiber River. They were rescued by a she-wolf who cared for them until a herdsman, Faustulus, found and raised them. The Capitoline Wolf has been housed since 1471 in the Palazzo dei Conservatori on the Campidoglio (the ancient Capitoline Hill), Rome, Italy.
The age and origin of the Capitoline Wolf is a subject of controversy. The statue was long thought to be an Etruscan work of the 5th century BC,[1] with the twins added in the late 15th century AD, probably by the sculptor Antonio Pollaiolo.[2] However, radiocarbon and thermoluminescence dating has found that the wolf portion of the statue was likely cast between 1021 and 1153.[3]
Description
The sculpture is somewhat larger than life-size, standing 75 cm high and 114 cm long. The wolf is depicted in a tense, watchful pose, with alert ears and glaring eyes watching for danger. By contrast, the human twins – executed in a completely different style – are oblivious to their surroundings, absorbed by their suckling.[4]
Attribution and dating
The she-wolf from the legend of Romulus and Remus was regarded as a symbol of Rome from ancient times. Several ancient sources refer to statues depicting the wolf suckling the twins. The oldest is Livy‘s report of one set up at the foot of the Palatine Hill in 295 B.C. (X.23). Pliny the Elder mentions the presence in the Roman Forum of a statue of a she-wolf that was “a miracle proclaimed in bronze nearby, as though she had crossed the Comitium while Attus Navius was taking the omens”. Cicero also mentions a statue of the she-wolf as one of a number of sacred objects on the Capitoline that had been inauspiciously struck by lightning in the year 65 BC: “it was a gilt statue on the Capitol of a baby being given suck from the udders of a wolf.”[5] Cicero also mentions the wolf in De Divinatione 1.20 and 2.47.[6]
It was widely assumed that the Capitoline Wolf was the very sculpture described by Cicero, due to the presence of damage to the sculpture’s paw, which was believed to correspond to the lightning strike of 65 BC. The 18th-century German art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann attributed the statue to an Etruscan maker in the 5th century BC, based on how the wolf’s fur was depicted.[7] It was first attributed to the Veiian artist Vulca, who decorated the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus, and then re-attributed to an unknown Etruscan artist of approximately 480-470 BC. Winckelmann correctly identified a Renaissance origin for the twins; they were probably added in 1471 or later.[8]
During the 19th century, a number of researchers questioned Winckelmann’s dating of the bronze. August Emil Braun, the secretary of the Archaeological Institute of Rome, proposed in 1854 that the damage to the wolf’s paw had been caused by an error during casting. Wilhelm Fröhner, the Conservator of the Louvre, stated in 1878 that style of the statue was attributable to the Carolingian period rather than the Etruscan, and in 1885 Wilhelm von Bode also stated that he was of the view that the statue was most likely a medieval work. However, these views were largely disregarded and had been forgotten by the 20th century.[8]
In 2006, the Italian art historian Anna Maria Carruba and the Etruscologist Adriano La Regina contested the traditional dating of the wolf on the basis of an analysis of the casting technique. Carruba had been given the task of restoring the sculpture in 1997, enabling her to examine how it had been made. She observed that the statue had been cast in a single piece using a variation of the lost-wax casting technique that was not used in ancient times; ancient Greek and Roman bronzes were typically constructed from multiple pieces, a method that facilitated high quality castings with less risk than would be involved in casting the entire sculpture at once. Single-piece casting was, however, widely used in medieval times to mould bronze items that needed a high level of rigidity, such as bells and cannon. Carruba argues, like Braun, that the damage to the wolf’s paw had resulted from an error in the moulding process. In addition, La Regina, who is the state superintendent of Rome’s cultural heritage, argues that the sculpture’s artistic style is more akin to Carolingian and Romanesque art than that of the ancient world.[8]
Radiocarbon and thermoluminescence dating was carried out at the University of Salento in February 2007 to resolve the question. The results revealed with an accuracy of 95.4 percent that the sculpture was crafted between the 11th and 12th century AD.
History of the sculpture
The sculpture in Musei Capitolini
It is unclear when the sculpture was first erected, but there are a number of medieval references to a “wolf” standing in the Pope’s Lateran Palace. In the 10th century Chronicon of Benedict of Soracte, the monk chronicler writes of the institution of a supreme court of justice “in the Lateran palace, in the place called the Wolf, viz, the mother of the Romans.” Trials and executions “at the Wolf” are recorded from time to time until 1438.[9]
The 12th-century English cleric Magister Gregorius wrote a descriptive essay De Mirabilibus Urbis Romae[10] and recorded in an appendix three pieces of sculpture he had neglected: one was the Wolf in the portico at the principal entrance to the Vatican Palace. He mentions no twins, for he noted that she was set up as if stalking a bronze ram that was nearby, which served as a fountain. The wolf had also served as a fountain, Magister Gregorius thought, but it had been broken off at the feet and moved to where he saw it.[11]
The present-day Capitoline Wolf could not have been the sculpture seen by Benedict and Gregorius, if its newly attributed age is accepted, though it is conceivable that it could have been a replacement for an earlier (now lost) depiction of the Roman wolf. In December 1471 Pope Sixtus IV ordered the present sculpture to be transferred to the Palazzo dei Conservatori on the Capitoline Hill, and the twins were added some time around then. The Capitoline Wolf joined a number of other genuinely ancient sculptures transferred at the same time, to form the nucleus of the Capitoline Museum.
Modern use and symbolism
Capitoline Wolf at Siena Duomo. According to a legend Siena was founded by Senius and Aschius, two sons of Remus. When they fled Rome, they took the statue of She-wolf to Siena, what becomes symbol of the town.
The image was favored by Benito Mussolini, who cast himself as the founder of the “New Rome“. To encourage American goodwill, he sent several copies of the Capitoline Wolf to U.S. cities. In 1929 he sent one replica for a Sons of Italy national convention in Cincinnati, Ohio. It was switched for another one in 1931, which still stands in Eden Park, Cincinnati.[12] Another replica was given by Mussolini to the city of Rome, Georgia, the same year.[13] A third copy went to Rome, New York.[14] Another ended up at North-Eastern Normal University, China, where ancient Greek and Roman history is studied.
The Capitoline Wolf was used on both the emblem and the poster for the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome. The Roman football club A.S. Roma uses it in its emblem as well.
The programme of conservation undertaken in the 1990s resulted in an exhibition devoted to the Lupa Capitolina and her iconography.[15]
In the 2009 movie Agora, set in 5th-century Alexandria, the Capitoline Wolf—complete with the del Pollaiolo twins—can be seen in the prefect’s palace. This is visible in the scene before Hypatia‘s capture, directly behind her character.
In Rick Riordan’s The Son of Neptune, Lupa is the wolf that trains all demigods who wish to enter Camp Jupiter. She trains Percy Jackson and is mentioned that she trained Jason Grace also.
The Boston Latin School uses an image on the cover of their agenda book as well as being the official school emblem.
The Capitoline Wolf is used in Romania and Moldova as a symbol of the Latin origin of its inhabitants and in some major cities there are replicas of the original statue given as a gift from Italy at the beginning of the 20th century.
Giacobbe Giusti, ‘Jules César’
Giacobbe Giusti, ‘Jules César’
César et les secrets du Rhône
Jusqu’au 24 mars 2013, aux archives départementales Gaston Deferre à Marseille le riche passé de l’Arles romaine est mis en lumière. Outre le désormais célèbre buste en marbre de l’empereur Jules César, des objets rarissimes sont ainsi rassemblés.
Plusieurs conférences viendront animer l’exposition et des visites commentées gratuites sont proposées aux adultes et aux plus jeunes. Plus d’informations et réservations ici.
Controverse
Le portrait controversé.
Le portrait de Jules César est un buste en marbre grandeur nature montrant un homme vieillissant. Il a été sorti du Rhône à l’automne 2007, par une équipe de la recherche archéologique subaquatique[9]. C’est au cours de cette même campagne que les plongeurs ont dégagé un Marsyas de style hellénistique et une sculpture en marbre grandeur nature de Neptune[10].
Cette découverte a fait la une de nombreux grands médias[11],[12]. Le réalisme du portrait le place dans la tradition de la sculpture de la fin de la République romaine. Luc Long, directeur de l’équipe qui a fouillé le Rhône, a suggéré qu’il s’agissait d’un portrait de Jules César et qu’il devrait être daté d’environ 46 avant notre ère. Ce qui a permis à Christine Albanel, ministre de la Culture et de la Communication, d’expliquer que c’était la plus ancienne représentation connue de César[13].
Luc Long a suggéré que ce buste a été discrètement éliminé après l’assassinat de César en 44 avant notre ère, quand la possession de ses portraits était devenu politiquement suspecte (courte période de damnatio memoriae, le buste du condamné post mortem pouvant servir de remblai[14]). « Je soupçonne le buste d’avoir été jeté dans le fleuve après qu’il eut été assassiné parce qu’il n’aurait pas été bon à l’époque pour être considéré comme l’un de ses partisans », a-t-il déclaré au moment de la révélation de la découverte[15].
Ce qui n’a pas empêché quelques personnalités de la presse et de l’archéologie de faire des objections. Mary Beard (en), spécialiste de commentaires polémistes dans The Times Literary Supplement, a déclaré qu’il n’y avait aucune raison d’identifier ce buste comme étant celui de César, en accusant au passage les inventeurs d’avoir organisé un coup de publicité[16].Ce buste aurait pu montrer le portrait de n’importe qui.
Puis ce fut le tour de Paul Zanker (de), directeur de l’Institut archéologique allemand de Rome[17], qui notait le manque de ressemblance avec les pièces émises au cours des dernières années de la vie du dictateur, et avec le buste Tusculum de César. Ce qui lui a permis de dater celui d’Arles de l’époque augustéenne[18].
Quant à Nathan T. Elkins, du Department of Art de l’Université Baylor[19], il émet des doutes dans un forum sur internet consacré à la numismatique et à l’archéologie, et propose le IIIe siècle comme date probable de l’immersion des statues dans le Rhône, indiquant même que ce buste d’origine hellénistique ne serait qu’une copie romaine[20].
Enfin Yann Le Bohec fait remarquer que les portraits de César sur les monnaies sont différents avec un homme au front fuyant, un nez busqué, de petites lèvres ourlées, un front très marqué et la pomme d’Adam proéminente[21].
Quid de César ?
Quid de César ?
Michel L’Hour, chef du département des recherches archéologiques subaquatiques et sous-marines (DRASSM), quand il déclarait, en 2008, « À l’unanimité, les chercheurs ont confirmé l’authenticité du portrait », ne pouvait se douter que celui-ci allait provoquer la constitution d’un « clan des anti-César ». Même réduite, cette contestation a fait prendre aux scientifiques des positions très fermes pour défendre l’identification première[22].
Christian Goudineau, professeur au Collège de France, confirme : « Pour moi, qui ai passé des années avec César, il n’y a aucun doute. J’ai été l’un des premiers à voir ce buste. Et quand je l’ai vu, je n’ai pas hésité. Je n’imaginais d’ailleurs pas que l’on puisse remettre en cause son authenticité. Par la suite, il y a effectivement eu une ou deux critiques. Mais elles émanaient de personnes qui n’avaient eu accès qu’à des photos. Ce qui a pu les gêner, c’est qu’il ne s’agit pas d’une représentation traditionnelle de César. Car la plupart des portraits connus jusque là ont été réalisés au milieu du siècle d’Auguste, 30 ou 40 ans après sa disparition. Des portraits idéalisés qui ont en quelque sorte lifté l’homme d’État romain »[23].
Luc Long, responsable de l’équipe du DRASSM qui a travaillé dans le Rhône, explique : « Aujourd’hui, il y a un certain consensus autour de cette interprétation. Le portrait d’Arles ressemble à celui de Tusculum[24],[25] par le profil. Ce que nous avons pu vérifier par une reconstitution en 3D. J’ai par ailleurs travaillé avec des médecins légistes de l’hôpital de la Timone à Marseille. Leurs observations ont permis de trouver des marqueurs communs entre la physionomie du buste d’Arles et celle du portrait italien, notamment des déformations osseuses peu accessibles au grand public ou une fossette supra-thyroïdienne. Un signe comme celui-ci, on n’en rencontre que chez une personne sur 15 000 à 25 000 »[26].
Claude Sintes, directeur du Musée de l’Arles antique, n’hésite pas à critiquer la position de l’archéologue allemand : « J’ai du mal à comprendre l’attitude d’un éminent scientifique comme l’Allemand Paul Zanker. Il a émis un jugement à partir de mauvaises photos vues sur internet et a fait paraître son article quelques jours après que la nouvelle de la découverte eut été rendue publique. C’est un peu gênant. Il évoque un visage du temps de César, celui d’un homme qui voulait ressembler au dictateur. Un peu comme au XIXe quand on portait la moustache pour ressembler à Napoléon III. De plus, Paul Zanker évoque le buste d’un notable. Mais il faut savoir qu’à l’époque du dictateur, Arles était une petite ville et n’avait pas de familles encore très puissantes »[27].
Jean-Paul Demoule, ancien président de l’Institut national de recherches archéologiques préventives (INRAP), tente de comprendre pourquoi une telle pièce a ce succès médiatique et procure un tel engouement populaire : « On assiste à un vrai phénomène de société. Pour moi, avec ce marbre, c’est l’inconscient collectif et le mythe national qui ressurgissent des eaux et des boues du Rhône pollué. Cela revient à dire qu’avec la statue, on a trouvé une œuvre d’art, le buste d’un homme mythique dont le nom a traversé les siècles. César, celui qui a fait basculer la France de la Préhistoire dans l’Histoire… Avec César, c’est le mythe national qui ressurgit : celui de Vercingétorix, de Clovis et de Napoléon. Le buste serait un portrait de l’homme d’État réalisé de son vivant. Celui qui regarde le marbre a donc l’impression de l’avoir en face de lui. Cela a un aspect assez fascinant »[28]
Arles bust
Marble bust found in the Rhone River near Arles
The Arles bust is a life-sized marble bust showing a man with nasolabial creases and hollows in his face. It was discovered in September–October 2007 in the Rhone River near Arles, southern France, by divers from the French Department of Subaquatic Archaeological Research.[1] During the same campaign, divers also recovered smaller statues of Marsyas in Hellenistic style and a life-size marble sculpture of Neptune dating, from its style, to the 3rd century CE.
It has been debated that it is a possible portrait of Julius Caesar.[2]
Analysis
The uncompromising realism of the portrait places it in the tradition of late Republican Roman portrait and genre sculptures of the 1st century BCE. The archaeologists suggested that this was a portrait of Julius Caesar and that it should be given a date of about 46 BCE, making it, according to France’s Minister of Culture Christine Albanel, the oldest known representation of Caesar.[3] They further suggested that the bust was discreetly disposed of after Caesar’s assassination in 44 BCE, when portraits of him could have been politically dangerous possessions.[4]
The story was carried by many major media outlets.[5][6] However, classicist Mary Beard objected that there was no basis whatsoever for identifying it as Caesar, and accused the discoverers of staging a publicity stunt.[7] Other historians were also quick to dispute the identification, among them Paul Zanker, an archaeologist and expert on Caesar and Augustus.[8] Many noted the lack of resemblances to Caesar’s likenesses issued on coins during the last years of the dictator’s life, and to the “Tusculum bust” of Caesar,[9] which is accepted as a depiction of Julius Caesar from his lifetime, based on its similarity to the coin portraits.
After a further stylistic assessment Zanker dated the Arles bust to the Augustan period. Elkins pointed out the 3rd century CE as the outside terminus post quem for the deposition of the statues, thereby disputing the claim that the bust was thrown away due to feared repercussions from Caesar’s assassination in 44 BCE.
Controversy about the identity of the bust is ongoing among French archeologists.[10]
Depictions
-
3D anaglyph of the marble bust found in the Rhone River near Arles
http://cmcasmarseille.fr/?p=27876
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%C3%A9sar,_le_Rh%C3%B4ne_pour_m%C3%A9moire
Giacobbe Giusti, ‘Lysippe’
Giacobbe Giusti, ‘Lysippe’
Lisippo
L’Apoxyomenos, copia romana, Museo Pio-Clementino
Socrate, busto scolpito, copia romana
Lisippo (in greco anticoΛύσιππος; Sicione, 390/385 a.C. – dopo il 306 a.C.) è stato uno scultore e bronzista greco antico. Ultimo tra i grandi maestri della scultura greca classica, fu attivo dal 372-368 a.C. fino alla fine del IV secolo a.C. Lavorò per Alessandro Magno, che ritrasse numerose volte, e terminò la propria carriera al servizio di un altro re macedone, Cassandro I, tra il 316 e il 311 a.C.
Indice
Cenni biografici
Originario di Sicione, città dell’Arcadia sul golfo di Corinto, nacque nei primi anni del IV secolo a.C. e si formò verosimilmente sulle opere di Policleto e sulla scultura peloponnesiaca, nonostante Duride di Samo lo dicesse formato al di fuori di ogni scuola e maestro, ovvero studioso della natura su consiglio di Eupompo, forse enfatizzando troppo il tema letterario del genio autodidatta.
Fu soprattutto bronzista e lavorò a lungo nella sua città per poi spostarsi in vari centri della Grecia (Olimpia, Corinto, Rodi, Delfi, Atene) e dell’Italia (Roma e Taranto).
Morì in data non precisata, ma sicuramente in età molto avanzata, come testimonia la notizia di un ritratto di Seleuco I Nicatore, quindi fino alla fine del secolo
Lysippe de Sicyone (v. 395 av. J.-C.– v. 305 av. J.-C.) est un sculpteur et bronziergrec. Il est notamment le portraitiste attitré d’Alexandre le Grand, père et maître de Laippos, Boédas, Euthycratès.
Sommaire
[masquer]
Biographie
Sa carrière s’étend de 372 av. J.-C., date à laquelle il réalise une statue de Troïlos, un vainqueur des Jeux olympiques, à 306 av. J.-C. environ. Pline l’Ancien situe son apogée lors de la 113eolympiade, c’est-à-dire vers 328 av. J.-C.[1]
Théoricien, il reprit les calculs de proportions de Polyclète et les modifia, en établissant un nouveau canon plus élancé du corps humain, avec une hauteur de huit têtes : la tête fait un huitième du corps au lieu de un septième. Multipliant les recherches sur le mouvement et le rôle de la lumière, il se fit le champion d’un art expressif et réaliste.
Il est réputé pour avoir produit 1 500 œuvres[2], et ne semble appartenir à aucune école de bronziers[3].
Parmi les œuvres ayant survécu, Lysippe est usuellement reconnu comme l’auteur de l’Apoxyomène, de l’Hercule Farnèse, de l’Éros bandant son arc, du monument votif de Daochos, du Pugiliste des Thermes, du type de l’Alexandre Azara ou encore de l’Hermès à la sandale.
Hermès d’Atalante, copie romaine d’un original attribué à Lysippe, Musée national archéologique d’Athènes
Giacobbe Giusti, a new world 