Giacobbe Giusti, Ducal palace, Mantua

Giacobbe Giusti, Ducal palace, Mantua

 

Giacobbe Giusti, Ducal palace, Mantua

 

Giacobbe Giusti, Ducal palace, Mantua

Domenico Morone, La Cacciata dei Bonacolsi (Mantova, Museo di Palazzo Ducale)

 

Giacobbe Giusti, Ducal palace, Mantua

 

Giacobbe Giusti, Ducal palace, Mantua

 

Giacobbe Giusti, Ducal palace, Mantua

 

Giacobbe Giusti, Ducal palace, Mantua

 

Giacobbe Giusti, Ducal palace, Mantua

 

Giacobbe Giusti, Ducal palace, Mantua

Façade of Palazzo Ducale.

San Giorgio Castle.

Corte Nuova and San Giorgio Castle. Photography by Paolo Monti

Giacobbe Giusti, Ducal palace, Mantua

Details of Pisanello’s frescoes in the “Hall of Pisanello”.

The Palazzo Ducale di Mantova (“Ducal Palace”) is a group of buildings in Mantua, Lombardy, northern Italy, built between the 14th and the 17th century mainly by the noble family of Gonzaga as their royal residence in the capital of their Duchy. The buildings are connected by corridors and galleries and are enriched by inner courts and wide gardens. The complex includes some 500 rooms and occupies an area of c. 34,000 m². Although most famous for Mantegna‘s frescos in the Camera degli Sposi(Wedding Room), they have many other very significant architectural and painted elements.

The Gonzaga family lived in the palace from 1328 to 1707, when the dynasty died out. Subsequently, the buildings saw a sharp decline, which was halted in the 20th century with a continuing process of restoration and the designation of the area as museum. In 1998, a hidden room was discovered by Palace scholars, led by musicologist Paula Bezzutti. The room is thought to have been used for performances of Monteverdi’s music in the late 16th century.^[1]

Corte Vecchia

The entrance of the palace is from Piazza Sordello, onto which the most ancient buildings, the Palazzo del Capitano and the Magna Domus, open. They formed the original nucleus of the so-called Corte Vecchia.

The Palazzo del Capitano (“Captain’s Palace”) was built in the late 13th century by the Captain of the People Guido Buonacolsi (whose family ruled Mantua from 1271 to 1328). Initially built on two floors and separated from the Magna Domus (Latin: “Big House”) by an alley, in the early 14th century it received a further floor and was united to the Magna Domus by a large façade with a portico. The additional floor consists of a huge hall (67×15 m), known as “Hall of the Weapon Room” of “Hall of Diet”, as it housed the Diet of Mantua in 1459.

The monumental Scalone delle Duchesse (“Duchesses’ Staircase”), built in the 17th century and renovated in 1779 by Paolo Pozzo, leads to the Room of the Morone, named after the 1494 canvas of the Veronese painter Domenico Morone, portraying the Expulsion of the Bonacolsi in 1328. In the noble floor of the Captain’s Palace is the First Room of Guastalla, with a fresco frieze with portraits of the Gonzaga family, which once extended to the successive room, the “Room of Pisanello“, from the artist who, from 1433, painted a series of frescoes depicting a Tournament and other scenes, which were left unfinished. His commissioner, Gianfrancesco Gonzaga, is portrayed in the paintings. The frescoes were rediscovered and restored in the 1960s and 1970s.

Apartment of Isabella d’Este

Main article: Studiolo of Isabella d’Este

In 1519 Isabella d’Este moved her residence from the Castle of St. George to this older sector of the Gonzaga palace, in the so-called “Widow Apartment”. Isabella’s apartment included two wings now divided by the entrance to the Cortile d’Onore (“Honour Court”). The “Grotto Wing” housed the wooden furnitures and the paintings from her famous studiolo, commissioned from 1496 to 1505 to Mantegna(Parnassus and Triumph of the Virtues), Lorenzo Costa the Elder(Isabella d’Este in the Realm of Harmony and the Realm of Komos) and Perugino (Combat of Love and Chastity), as well as new ones by Correggio (Allegory of Vice and Allegory of Virtue). Another hall in the same wing is the Camera Granda or Scalcheria, frescoed in 1522 by the Mantuan artist Lorenzo Leonbruno. The apartment included further halls in the so-called “Wing of Santa Croce”, from the name of a church of the time of Matilda of Canossa, over whose remains were built rooms such as the Sala delle Imprese Isabelliane (“Wing of Isabella’s Deeds”), the Sala Imperiale (“Imperial Hall”), Sala delle Calendule (“Hall of the Calendulae”), Sala delle Targhe and Sala delle Imprese. Later Guglielmo X Gonzaga, in the 16th century, transformed the rooms of the Corte Vecchia creating the Refectory, facing the Hanging Garden, and the Sala dello Specchio (“Hall of the Mirror”), used for music.

Apartment of the Tapestries

During the Habsburg rule in Mantua, the Refectory was refurbished, with the creation of the Sala dei Fiumi (“Hall of the Rivers”) with paintings on the walls on which the rivers in the Mantuan territory are portrayed as giants. At the same time was created the Appartamento degli Arazzi (“Apartment of the Tapestries”), comprising four halls. Three of the latter have tapestries, executed in the Flanders on cartoons by Raphael, the same used for those in the Raphael Roomsin the Vatican Palace. They were bought at Brussels by Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga in the early 16th century to decorate what at the time was called the Green Apartment. After decorating the Palatine church of St. Barbara and a period in the Ducal Palace’s stores, the Flemish tapestries were restored in 1799 and placed in the current location. A further restoration was carried on during the Napoleonic Wars in the Sala dello Zodiaco (“Hall of the Zodiac”), also known as “Napoleon I‘s Hall”, after the French emperor slept there.

Castle of St. George

The Castle of St. George (Castello di San Giorgio) was built from 1395 and finished in 1406 under commission by Francesco I Gonzaga, designed by Bartolino da Novara, one of the most renowned military architects of the time. It has as square plan with four corner towers, surrounded by a ditch with three entrances, each one with a drawbridge. In 1459 architect Luca Fancelli, commissioned by marquis Ludovico III Gonzaga, who assigned several rooms of the Corte Vecchia for the Council of Mantua called by Pope Pius II, restored the castle, which lost definitely lost its military and defensive function.

Detail of the frescoes by Andrea Mantegna in the Camera degli Sposi in the Palazzo Ducale.

Camera degli Sposi

Main article: Camera degli Sposi

The Camera Picta (Latin: “Painted Chamber”) or Camera degli Sposi (Italian: “Bridal Chamber”) is the most famous room of the palace, known for its frescoes executed by Andrea Mantegna, from 1465 to 1475, as attested by slab celebrating the end of the works. The painter’s decoration creates an illusionistic space, as if the chamber was a loggia with three openings facing country landscapes among arcades and curtains. The painted scenes portrays members of the Gonzaga family.

Domus Nova

Map of Rome in the Ducal Palace of Mantua

The Domus Nova (Latin: “New House”) was originally designed by Luca Fancelli in 1480–84. During the reign of Duke Vincenzo I Gonzaga(1562–1612) the edifice was renovated, creating the current Appartamento Ducale(“Ducal Apartment”) designed in 1595 by Cremonese artist and architect Antonio Maria Viani.

The Galleria Nuova (“New Corridor”) was constructed in 1778 by Giuseppe Piermarini to connect the Guastalla apartment to the Ducal apartment. It houses several altarpieces from the early 16th century to the late 18th century by Francesco Borgani, Carlo Bononi, Spagnolettoand others. The gallery leads to the huge Sala degli Arcieri (“Room of the Archers”), the site of Duke Vincenzo’s original apartment. Here can be found a celebrated altarpiece by Peter Paul Rubens (1605), formerly part of a triptych for the church of Santissima Trinità in Mantua, portraying the Gonzaga Family in Adoration of the Holy Trinity, as well as other paintings from now-suppressed churches and monasteries. This room is opens to the Galleria degli Specchi (“Hall of Mirrors”), built as an open loggia under Vincenzo I, with frescoes by two pupils of Guido Reni and neoclassicist decoration dating from 1773–79.

Scala Santa.

Under his apartment in the Domus Nova, Vincenzo Gonzaga’s son, Cardinal (later Duke) Ferdinand (1587–1626) had Viani design a series of ever-smaller rooms, long known as the Appartamento dei nani(“Dwarves’ Apartments”) and believed to have been built to house the celebrated court dwarves of Mantua. In 1979, however, Italian art historian Renato Berzaghi convincingly demonstrated that these tiny rooms are instead an exact reproduction of an ancient Roman original: the Scala Santa (“Holy Stairway”) of St. John Lateran in Rome, and were intended for devotional purposes.^{[citation needed]}

Corte Nuova

The main feature of the Corte Nuova (“New Court”) is the Sala di Manto, once the entrance to the “Apartment of Troy”, which takes its name from the frescoes (1538–1539) by collaborators of Giulio Romano, commissioned by Federico II Gonzaga to restore several rooms in the Palace. The current appearance of the Sala del Mantodates to the intervention of Guglielmo X, who ordered the creation of the Appartamento Grande di Castello (“Large Apartment of the Castle”). The frescoes in the hall depict the story of Troy, preceded by the arrival in Italy of Manto, a legendary daughter of Tiresias.

Façade of Santa Barbara.

Palatine church of Santa Barbara

Bell tower of church of Santa Barbara.

The church of Santa Barbara, which had the role of Palace chapel (“Basilica Palatina”) for the Gonzagas, was built in 1562-1572 by Giovanni Battista Bertani, commissioned by Duke Guglielmo.^[2] It allowed for religious ceremonies, with some degree of independence from the papal hierarchy. It was outfitted with an Antegnati organ (1565) by one of the premier builders of Northern Italy. The organ was restored in 1995.

The church has a central plan, with a square tiburium in the middle, followed by a raised semicircular presbytery covered by another tiburium, similar to the other one, and ending into a scenographic apse decorated with coffers. Under the presbytery is the crypt with an oval memorial. The bell tower has a square plan, and is topped by a small temple. Recently the remains of four dukes and other members of the Gonzaga family, including those of Guglielmo, were discovered in the church.

The interior contains two lateral altars, surmounted by large canvas altarpieces by Lorenzo Costa the younger, depicting The Baptism of Emperor Costantine and the Martyrdom of Sant’Adrian. The presbytery has a painting of Martyrdom of St Barbara (1564), by Domenico Brusasorci; and an Annunciation by Fermo Ghisoni beside the Graziadio Antegnati organ. Ghisoni also painted around 1566, the St Barbara and San Peter on the other side.

Interior with organ on right wall

Cortile della Cavallerizza.

Gardens and courtyards

• Cortile della Cavallerizza, designed by Giovanni Battista Bertani, who in 1556 adapted the style of the buildings surrounding this courtyard to the Mannerist style of Giulio Romano characterizing the pre-existing palace, called “La Rustica”, which also faced it. It was the place where the Gonzaga’s horses were shown before being sold.
• Giardino dei Semplici(“Garden of Simples”, i. e., medicinal herbs), also known as Giardino del Padiglione, built in 1603 by Zenobio Bocchi. It housed the flowers and the essences used by the members of the Gonzaga court to perfume their clothes.
• Hanging Garden, in the Refectory (late-16th century), located at 12 m of elevation. During the 18th century, during the Austrian rule, it received a Coffee House.
• Secret Garden, part of the apartment of Isabella d’Este in the Corte Vecchia, built 1522 by the Mantuan architect Gian Battista Covo.
• Cortile delle Otto Facce (“Courtyard of the Eight Faces”), also known as Cortile degli Orsi (“Courtyard of the Bears”).
• Cortile del Frambus
• Cortile d’Onore or Ducal Garden
• Cortile di Santa Croce
• Cortile dei Cani

Ceiling of Camera degli Sposi

References

1. Jump up^ Howard Goodall, Big Bangs, 2000
2. Jump up^ Palatine Basilica of Santa Barbara Website (italian)

• Museum of Palazzo Ducale
• The Ducal Palace
• Society for the Ducal Palace

Coordinates: 45°9′37″N 10°47′56″E

hide v t e Landmarks of Lombardy

Accademia Carrara di Belle Arti di Bergamo Basilica of Sant’Andrea, Mantua Bellagio Cappella Colleoni Castelseprio Certosa di Pavia Como Cathedral Cremona Cathedral Crespi d’Adda Ducal palace, Mantua Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, Milan Lake Como Lake Garda Milan Cathedral Monastery of San Salvatore, Brescia Monte Isola Monza Cathedral Palazzo del Te Porta Nuova, Milan Rock Drawings in Valcamonica Royal Villa of Monza Sacri Monti of Lombardy San Michele Maggiore, Pavia San Siro Stadium Stelvio National Park Torrazzo of Cremona

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ducal_palace,_Mantua

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Giacobbe Giusti, Power and Pathos

Giacobbe Giusti, Power and Pathos

         

 

Head of Apollo, First century BCE–first century CE, bronze, 51 x 40 x 38 cm. Salerno, Museo Archeologico Provinciale.

By Alain.R.Truong

FLORENCE.- From 14 March to 21 June 2015, Palazzo Strozzi in Florence will be the first venue to host the major exhibition entitled Power and Pathos. Bronze Sculpture of the Hellenistic World organised and produced in conjunction with the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the Soprintendenza Archeologica della Toscana, Tuscany’s directorate general for archaeology. After Florence, the exhibition will travel to the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles from 28 July to 1 November 2015 and then to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, from 6 December 2015 to 20 March 2016.

Statue Base signed by Lysippos, End of fourth–beginning of third century BCE, blue-grey limestone, 30 x 70.5 x 70,5 cm. Corinth, 37th Ephorate of Prehistoric and Classical Antiquities.

This important joint venture reinforces Palazzo Strozzi’s international reputation for excellence. The exhibition will showcase – for the first time in Florence – some of the greatest masterpieces of the ancient world from such leading Italian and international museums as the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Florence, the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid, the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Naples, the British Museum in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Galleria degli Uffizi in Florence, the National Archaeological Museum of Athens, the Archaeological Museum of Heraklion (Crete), the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki, the Musée du Louvre in Paris, the Vatican Museums and the Musei Capitolini in Rome.

Portrait Statue of Aule Meteli (Arringatore), Late second century BCE, bronze, 179 cm. Florence, Museo Archeologico Nazionale.

Power and Pathos features about 50 extraordinary sculptures in bronze and tells the story of the artistic achievements of the Hellenistic era (4th to 1st centuries BC), when new bronze-working techniques were developed, new forms of expression were explored, and a first globalized language of art emerged in the Mediterranean and beyond. In this cosmopolitan climate, Greek art, in effect, became an international phenomenon.

Statuette of Alexander the Great on Horseback, First century BCE, bronze, with silver inlays, 49 x 47 x 29 cm. Naples, Museo Archeologico Nazionale.

The vast Hellenistic empire founded by Alexander the Great stretched from Greece and the borders of Ethiopia to the Indus Valley, embracing Egypt, Persia, and Mesopotamia. Thus its astonishing output in the fields of art, history and philosophy enjoyed extensive dissemination. While the Classical Greek world was based essentially on the polis, or citystate, now art served more than the cities and their citizens and focused instead on the courts of Alexander’s successors. Artists devoted their skills to celebrating the rulers and their achievements, adopting and adapting Classical modes of expression to suit new needs.

Horse Head (“Medici Riccardi” Horse), Second half of the fourth century BCE, bronze, 81 x 95 x 40 cm. Florence, Museo Archeologico Nazionale.

The exhibition owes its unique character to bronze, an alloy of copper, tin, and often lead, so significant in ancient technology and art that Pliny the Elder dedicated an entire book to this medium. Bronze works are extremely rare today, and the vast majority of large bronzes from the ancient world are lost because they have been melted down over the centuries so that the metal could be used to mint coins and to manufacture arms. Immediately after casting, bronze was so dazzling that it resembled gold.

Head of a Man with Kausia, Third century BCE, bronze, faïence or alabaster, 32 x 27.9 cm. Pothia, Archaeological Museum of Kalymnos.

One of the reasons this show is an unprecedented, once-in-a-lifetime event is that it will allow visitors to admire works never before seen together: the bronze Apoxyomenos from Vienna alongside the Uffizi’s marble version used in its restoration; the two archaising Apollo-Kouroi from the Louvre and from Pompeii. Although all of these “pairs” have frequently been shown together in photographs, this is the very first time that any of them have been displayed side by side. A large number of the bronzes surviving to this day were found in the sea rather than on dry land. Spectacular underwater finds include the figure of a General (Lucius Aemilius Paullus?) found in the sea off Brindisi in 1992, and the Head of a Man with Kausia (discovered in the Aegean off the island of Kalymnos in 1997).

Portrait of a Diadoch (Demetrios Poliorketes?), 310–290 BCE, bronze, 45 x 35 x 39 cm. Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado.

The discovery of the head of Apollo in the sea off Salerno in December 1930 was poetically described by Nobel Prize laureate Giuseppe Ungaretti: “Night had almost fallen and the anchovy fishermen were returning to port in single file. Gathering up their nets, one of the fishermen found […] a head of Apollo in his net. Holding it up in the palm of his lined hand and seeing it now imbued with new life in the light and appearing to bleed – where it had been severed at the neck – in the fire of the setting sun, the fisherman thought he was looking at St. John the Baptist. I myself have seen it at the Museum in Salerno; it may be by Praxiteles or possibly Hellenistic […] its indulgent and quivering smile hinting at an ineffable song of youth restored to life!”

Portrait of Arsinoë III, Late third century–early second century BCE, bronze, 30 x 20 x 30 cm. Mantua, Museo Civico di Palazzo Te.

Unlike Classical artists, who sought to convey a sense of balance and serenity, Hellenistic sculptors aimed to capture the full range of human feelings, from anger and passion to joy and anguish. They typically emphasised pathos, or lived experience, in the figures they depicted, and we find this also in the portraits of the men who rose to power in Alexander’s wake. Such portraits were designed to bolster the sitters’ legitimacy and dynastic connections through a combination of individual features both dramatic and idealised. Statues of athletes such as the so-called Apoxyomenos—a figure shown after the competition, holding a small curved instrument called a strigil used to scrape off sweat and dirt from the body— focus on the nude male body in its various forms. Artists no longer represent wholly idealised forms, as in the Classical era, but depict momentary details that vividly express physical and emotional states.

Statue of a Man, Second century BCE, bronze, 127 x 75 x 49 cm h. 30 cm (head). Brindisi, Museo Archeologico Provinciale “F. Ribezzo”.

Curated by Jens Daehner and Kenneth Lapatin of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the exhibition offers a comprehensive overview of the Hellenistic bronze sculpture in its larger archaeological, cultural and geographical environments.

Portrait of a Man, First century BCE, bronze, 29.5 x 21.5 x 21.5 cm. Malibu, J. Paul Getty Museum.

Monumental statues of gods, athletes, and heroes will be displayed alongside portraits of historical figures—including select sculptures in marble and stone—in a journey allowing visitors to explore the fascinating stories of these masterpieces’ discovery, often at sea (Mediterranean, Black Sea) but also in the course of archaeological digs, thus setting the finds in their ancient contexts. Those contexts could be a sanctuary where they were used for votive purposes, a public space where they celebrated personalities or events, a home where they fulfilled a decorative function, or a cemetery where they commemorated the deceased. A unique feature of the Palazzo Strozzi exhibition is that it sets the works in context by also probing and exploring the production and casting processes and the finishing techniques adopted.

Statuette of a Ruler as Hermes or Perseus, First century BCE–first century CE, bronze, with base 80 x 30 x 25.4 cm. Naples, Museo Archeologico Nazionale.

Statue of a Young Man, Third–fourth century BCE, bronze, 152 x 52 x 68 cm. Athens, Ephorate of Underwater Antiquities.

Statuette of Hermes, c. 150 BCE, bronze, 49 x 20 x 15 cm. London, The British Museum.

Statuette of the Weary Herakles, Third century BCE or first century CE (?); copy of a fourth-century BCE bronze by Lysippos, bronze, silver, 35.9 x 17.5 x 14 cm h. 39 cm with base. Chieti, Museo Archeologico Nazionale d’Abruzzo.

Statuette of an Artisan, Mid-first century BCE, bronze, silver, 40.03 x 13 x 10.8 cm. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Statuette of Herakles Epitrapezios (Herakles seated), First century BCE–first century CE, bronze, limestone, 75 x 67 x 54 cm h. 95 cm with base. Naples, Museo Archeologico Nazionale.

Statue of Eros Sleeping, Third–second century BCE, bronze, 41.9 x 85.2 x 35.6 cm. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Portrait of a Man, End of second–beginning of first century BCE, bronze, glass paste, black stone, 32.5 x 22 x 22 cm. Athens, National Archaeological Museum.

Portrait of a Bearded Man, c. 150 BCE, marble, 40.7 x 25 x 31.7 cm. Malibu, J. Paul Getty Museum.

Head of a Votive Statue, 375–350 BCE, bronze, 24.3 x 15.5 x 15.5 cm.London, The British Museum.

Portrait of a Man, Late fourth–third century BCE, bronze, copper, glass paste, 26.8 x 21.8 x 23.5 cm. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Portrait Statue of a Young Ephebe, First half of the first century BCE, bronze, with base 140 x 57.2 x 45.1 cm. Heraklion, Archaeological Museum.

Portrait Statue of an Aristocratic Boy, Augustan period (27 BCE–14 CE), bronze, 132.4 x 50.8 x 41.9 cm. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Portrait of a Man, First century BCE, bronze, 43 x 26 x 25 cm. Naples, Museo Archeologico Nazionale.

Bust of a Man (Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus Pontifex), Late first century BCE–early first century CE, 46 x 28 x 23 cm. Naples, Museo Archeologico Nazionale.

Portrait of a Man, 50–25 BCE, bronze, copper, marble, 32 x 22 x 22 cm h. 22.5 cm (head). Copenaghen, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek.

Statue of an Athlete (Apoxyomenos from Ephesos), 1–50 CE, bronze, 205.4 x 78.7 x 77.5 cm. Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum.

Head of an Athlete (Ephesos Apoxyomenos type), Second century BCE–first century CE, bronze, 29.2 x 21 x 27.3 cm h. 51.4 cm with base. Fort Worth, Kimbell Art Museum.

Statue of an Athlete (Ephesos Apoxyomenos type), Second century CE, marble, h. 193 cm. Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi.

Torso of an Athlete (Ephesos Apoxyomenos type), First century CE, basanite, h. 110 cm. Castelgandolfo, Musei Vaticani, Villa Pontificia, Antiquarium.

Herm of Dionysos (Getty Herm), Workshop of Boëthos of Kalchedon (attributed), Second century BCE, bronze, copper, calcitic stone, 103.5 x 23.5 x 19.5 cm. Malibu, J. Paul Getty Museum.

Athena (Minerva of Arezzo), 300–270 BCE, bronze, copper, 155 x 50 x 50 cm. Florence, Museo Archeologico Nazionale.

Medallion with the Bust of Athena, c. 150 BCE, bronze, white glass paste, 27.2 x 27.1 x 19 cm. Thessaloniki, Archaeological Museum.

Head of Aphrodite (?), First century BCE, bronze, 37x 30.5 x 29 cm. London, The British Museum.

Statue of Apollo (Piombino Apollo), 120–100 BCE, bronze, copper, silver, 117 x 42 x 42 cm. Paris, Musée du Louvre.

Statue of Apollo (Kouros), First century BCE–first century CE, bronze, copper, bone, dark stone, glass, 128 x 33 x 38 cm. Pompeii, Soprintendenza Speciale per i Beni Archeologici di Pompei, Ercolano e Stabia.

Torso of a Youth (The Vani Torso), Second century BCE, bronze, 105 x 45 x 25 cm. Tbilisi, Georgian National Museum.

Herm Bust of the Doryphoros, Apollonios (active late first century BCE), Late first century BCE, bronze, 58 x 66 x 27 cm. Naples, Museo Archeologico Nazionale.

Ephebe (Idolino from Pesaro), c. 30 BCE, bronze, copper, lead, h. 148 cm h. 300 cm with base. Florence, Museo Archeologico Nazionale.

Bust of an Ephebe (Beneventum Head), c. 50 BCE, bronze, copper, 33 x 23 x 20 cm. Paris, Musée du Louvre.

Spinario (Spinario Castellani), c. 25–50 CE, marble, cm 69 x 40,5 x 35. London, The British Museum.

https://francescarachelvalle.wordpress.com/2015/03/15/firenze-potere-e-pathos-bronzi/

http://alaintruong.canalblog.com/archives/2015/03/14/31700771.html

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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’.

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