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

Eben Shapiro

Rhyton in the form of a Centaur Greek, Seleucid, Hellenistic period, ca. 160 B.C. Silver with gilding Antikensammlung, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna…

The Akropolis of Pergamon, by Friedrich (von) Thiersch, 1882. Pen and ink with watercolor on canvas SMB/Antikensammlung…

Mosaic Emblèma with Itinerant Musicians, Roman, Late Republican period, 2nd-1st century B.C. Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples

The Vienna Cameo Greek (Ptolemaic), Early Hellenistic period, 278-270/69 B.C. Ten–layered onyx Antikensammlung, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna…

Statuette of a Veiled and Masked Dancer (The Baker Dancer). Greek, Hellenistic period, 3rd-2nd century B.C. Bronze. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY…

Pair of Armbands with Triton and Tritoness. Greek, Hellenistic period, ca. 200 B.C. Gold and silver. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY…

Small statue of Alexander the Great astride Bucephalos Roman, Late Republican or Early Imperial period, second half of the 1st century B.C.; copy of a Greek original of ca. 320-300 B.C. Bronze Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples …

 

Statuette of the Weary Herakles Greek, Hellenistic period, 3rd century B.C., base early 1st century A.D. Bronze and silver Museo Archeologico Nazionale d’Abruzzo …

Stater of Mithridates VI Eupator Dionysos Greek, Late Hellenistic period, 86-85 B.C. Gold Epigraphic and Numismatic Museum, Athens, Greece …

Portrait of a Man. Greek, Late Hellenistic period, early 1st century B.C. Bronze Hellenic Ministry of Culture, Education and Religious Affairs/Archaeological Receipts Fund …

 

Sleeping Hermaphrodite Roman, first half of the 2nd century A.D. Copy of a Greek original of the 2nd century B.C. Marble Soprintendenza Speciale per i Beni Archeologici di Roma …

 

By

Eben Shapiro

The Wall Street Journal

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.

 

“This won’t happen again,” said Carlos A. Picón, the curator in charge of the Greek and Roman Art department at the Met. “Once the museum reopens, they won’t send one-third of its collection here.”

Dr. Scholl said the only piece he was unwilling to send was a famous marble head of the ruler Attalus. The piece is renowned for its tousled hair, and a curator was worried that the many curls were too fragile to withstand the rigors of travel. (Classical sculptors loved playing with the contrast between a figure’s smooth marble skin and the gnarly, robust beards of figures like Zeus.)

Thanks to the core provided by the Pergamon collection, “this is the largest and most comprehensive show” the museum’s Greek and Roman department has undertaken, said Mr. Picón. It’s also the department’s first major show since the Met completed its own renovation in 2007, a 15-year, $223 million project that Mr. Picón presided over.

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

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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/

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Giacobbe Giusti, Puissance et Pathos, bronzes du monde hellénistique

estimento di Potere e pathosda Palazzo Strozzi (Firenze)

Giacobbe Giusti, Puissance et Pathos, bronzes du monde hellénistique

Di: Palazzo Strozzi (Firenze)

Florence – Heureux les tempêtes et les naufrages qui ont conservé ces quelques unes des merveilles de l’art de la sculpture en bronze. La mer nous a donné non seulement le Bronzes de Riace, chefs-d’œuvre de grec classique, mais aussi de nombreuses autres œuvres plus ou moins intactes les siècles qui ont vu le grand projet impérial d’Alexandre le Grand. Nous sommes dans une période de grandes contaminations créatifs entre l’Occident et l’Orient grec mésopotamienne et perse, un vaste territoire qui a fait jusqu’à l’Indus pour limiter la force expansive du Macédonien. Des siècles d’expérimentation artistique nouvelle, séries de Périclès classique, que l’exposition “Puissance et Pathos, bronzes du monde hellénistique “, ouvert au public depuis hier 14 Mars au Palazzo Strozzi, documents avec 50 parmi les mieux conservés de bronze fonctionne dans les grands musées du monde: par Archéologique de Florence, Naples, Athènes, Thessalonique, Crète, al British Museum, Prado, la Galerie des Offices, il Metropolitan di New York, Louvre, le Kunsthistorisches Museum de Vienne et le Vatican.

 

Allestimento di Potere e pathosda Palazzo Strozzi (Firenze)

 

L’impact de la rencontre avec ces pièces en grande partie retournés de la mer est vaste intellectuel et émotionnel. Jusqu’à présent, il ne était pas possible de les voir tous ensemble, comme à Florence, triés dans une exposition cohérente et bien illustré par les légendes (sept sections thématiques, divisé par sujet, changements de style et de sensibilité artistique et le potentiel de la technique de bronze) sous le chiffre conceptuelle exprimées droit: puissance et pathos. Décédé à la force d’innovation des cités grecques, commence L’impact de la rencontre avec ces pièces en grande partie retournés de la mer est vaste intellectuel et émotionnel. Jusqu’à présent, il ne était pas possible de les voir tous ensemble, comme à Florence, triés dans une exposition cohérente et bien illustré par les légendes (sept sections thématiques, divisé par sujet, changements de style et de sensibilité artistique et le potentiel de la technique de bronze) sous le chiffre conceptuelle exprimées droit: puissance et pathos. Décédé à la force d’innovation des cités grecques, commence l’ère des rois, ouverte Alexandrie aventure exceptionnelle. L’art abandonne le pouvoir archaïque de l’humanité qui a pris possession de son existence et de l’équilibre, en harmonie avec la divinité et de la nature, pour représenter l’image de la puissance héroïque et dramatique et, à la fois, les multiples facettes de la beauté qui devient de plus en plus une expression des émotions et des sentiments. Sentiments qui sont lus sur les visages de beaucoup de charme que celui de Diadoque, générale et héritier d’Alexandre (peut-être Démétrius Poliorcète) zone à cheval sur la quatrième et troisième siècles avant JC. têtes S portrait du premier siècle ou même le buste de Lucius Calpurnius Piso, le Pontife. Du point de vue de la compréhension technique et artistique, la pièce la plus intéressante est celle de ‘Apoxyomenos, l’athlète strigile, l’outil pour nettoyer le corps par la sueur, pas pris dans une fixité parfaite, mais le débit instantané de l’action. La statue complete conservé à Vienne est comparé à plusieurs répliques dans différents matériaux, comme la version en marbre Uffizi, ou pierre sombre. –

 

                                       

La troisième section, dédiée à «corps idéaux, organismes extrêmes “, illustre les changements de style et la recherche de nouveaux sujets tirés de la vie quotidienne. La dynamique du corps est étudiée avec une grande précision de détails dans les personnages très différents de Kouroi classique puissante mais essentiellement immobiles, le modèle de qui retourne dans le goût fin de l’hellénisme. Reproduction peau parfaite, le mal rasé, Ride, la conception des muscles et les veines sont quelques-unes des possibilités que les subventions de bronze artiste

Organisée par Jens Daehner et le J. Paul Getty Museum de Los Angeles Kenneth Lapatin, L’exposition sera ouverte au Palazzo Strozzi jusqu’au 21 Juin. Ensuite, il déménager à Los Angeles (28 Juillet – 1 Novembre) de mettre fin à son voyage à la National Gallery of Art de Washington (6 Décembre – 20 Mars 2016).

– See more at: http://www.stamptoscana.it/articolo/cultura/bronzi-ellenistici-in-mostra-il-volto-del-potere-il-potere-dei-volti?lang=fr#sthash.VaEmpwzE.dpuf

 

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estimento di Potere e pathosda Palazzo Strozzi (Firenze)

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’.

http://www.minervamagazine.co.uk/feature-2015-08.html

http://www.giacobbegiuti.com

Giacobbe Giusti, The Last Judgment by Michelangelo

Giacobbe Giusti, The Last Judgment by Michelangelo

 

 

 

Artist	Michelangelo
Year	1536–1541
Type	Fresco
Dimensions	1370 cm × 1200 cm (539.3 in × 472.4 in)
Location	Sistine Chapel, Vatican City

 

The Last Judgment, or The Last Judgement (Italian: Il Giudizio Universale),^[1] is a fresco by the Italian Renaissance master Michelangelo executed on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel in Vatican City. It is a depiction of the Second Coming of Christ and the final and eternal judgment by God of all humanity. The souls of humans rise and descend to their fates, as judged by Christ surrounded by prominent saints including Saints Catherine of Alexandria, Peter, Lawrence, Bartholomew, Paul, Sebastian, John the Baptist, and others.

The work took four years to complete and was done between 1536 and 1541 (preparation of the altar wall began in 1535.) Michelangelo began working on it twenty five years after having finished the Sistine Chapel ceiling.

An older and more thoughtful Michelangelo originally accepted the commission for this important painting from Pope Clement VII.^[2] The original subject of the mural was the resurrection, but with the Pope’s death, his successor, Pope Paul III, felt the Last Judgment was a more fitting subject for 1530s Rome and the judgmental impulses of the Counter-Reformation. While traditional medieval last judgments showed figures dressed according to their social positions, Michelangelo created a new standard. His groundbreaking concept of the event shows figures equalized in their nudity, stripped bare of rank. The artist portrayed the separation of the blessed and the damned by showing the saved ascending on the left and the damned descending on the right. The fresco is more monochromatic than the ceiling frescoes and is dominated by the tones of flesh and sky. The cleaning and restoration of the fresco, however, revealed a greater chromatic range than previously apparent. Orange, green, yellow, and blue are scattered throughout, animating and unifying the complex scene.

• 1 Reception and expurgation
• 2 Restoration
• 3 Detail
• 4 See also
• 5 References
• 6 External links

Reception and expurgation

1549 copy of the still unretouched mural by Marcello Venusti (Museo di Capodimonte, Naples).

The Last Judgment was an object of a heavy dispute between critics within the Catholic Counter-Reformation and those who appreciated the genius of the artist and the Mannerist style of the painting. Michelangelo was accused of being insensitive to proper decorum, in respect of nudity and other aspects of the work, and of flaunting personal style over appropriate depictions of content. He was considered to have gone much too far in his beardless and muscle-bound figure of Christ, which very clearly adapted classical sculptures of Apollo, and this path was rarely followed by other artists.

A few years after the fresco was completed, the decrees of the Council of Trent urged a tightening-up of church control of “unusual” sacred images. In response to certain accusers, when the Pope’s own Master of Ceremonies Biagio da Cesena said of the painting “it was mostly disgraceful that in so sacred a place there should have been depicted all those nude figures, exposing themselves so shamefully,” and that it was no work for a papal chapel but rather “for the public baths and taverns,” Michelangelo worked Cesena’s face into the scene as Minos, judge of the underworld (far bottom-right corner of the painting) with Donkey ears (i.e. indicating foolishness), while his nudity is covered by a coiled snake. It is said that when Cesena complained to the Pope, the pontiff joked that his jurisdiction did not extend to hell, so the portrait would have to remain.^[3]

The genitalia in the fresco, referred to as ‘objectionable,’ were painted over with drapery after Michelangelo died in 1564 by the Mannerist artist Daniele da Volterra, when the Council of Trent condemned nudity in religious art.^[1] The Council’s decree in part reads:

Every superstition shall be removed … all lasciviousness be avoided; in such wise that figures shall not be painted or adorned with a beauty exciting to lust… there be nothing seen that is disorderly, or that is unbecomingly or confusedly arranged, nothing that is profane, nothing indecorous, seeing that holiness becometh the house of God. And that these things may be the more faithfully observed, the holy Synod ordains, that no one be allowed to place, or cause to be placed, any unusual image, in any place, or church, howsoever exempted, except that image have been approved of by the bishop.^[4]

Restoration

Main article: Restoration of the Sistine Chapel frescoes

The fresco was restored along with the Sistine vault between 1980 and 1994 under the supervision of curator of the Vatican Museums Fabrizio Mancinelli. The illustration reflects the restoration. During the course of the restoration about half of the censorship of the “Fig-Leaf Campaign” was removed. Numerous pieces of buried details, caught under the smoke and grime of scores of years were revealed after the restoration. It was discovered that the fresco of Biagio de Cesena as Minos with donkey ears was being bitten in the genitalia by a coiled snake. Another discovery is of the figure condemned to Hell directly below and to the right of St. Bartholomew with flayed skin. It was, for centuries, considered to be male until removal of the “fig leaf” showed that it was female.

Detail

Mary and Christ Angels St. Bartholomew displaying his flayed skin. St. Peter holding the Keys

 

『最後の審判』（さいごのしんぱん、イタリア語 Giudizio Universale）は、ルネサンス期の芸術家ミケランジェロの代表作で、バチカン宮殿のシスティーナ礼拝堂の祭壇に描かれたフレスコ画である。1541年に完成した。

これより先、ミケランジェロはローマ教皇ユリウス2世よりシスティーナ礼拝堂の天井画を描くよう命じられ、1508年から1512年にかけて『創世記』をテーマにした作品を完成させている。それから20数年経ち、教皇クレメンス7世に祭壇画の制作を命じられ、後継のパウルス3世の治世である1535年から約5年の歳月をかけて1541年に『最後の審判』が完成した。天井画と祭壇画の間には、ローマ略奪という大事件があり、今日、美術史上でも盛期ルネサンスからマニエリスムの時代への転換期とされている。

ミケランジェロが『最後の審判』を描くより前、祭壇画としてペルジーノの『聖母被昇天』が描かれており、ミケランジェロは当初ペルジーノの画を残すプランを提案していた。しかしこの案はクレメンス7世により却下され、祭壇の壁面の漆喰を完全に剥がされてペルジーノの画は完全に失われた（スケッチのみが現存する）。 ペルジーノが描いた『聖母被昇天』には、画の発注主であるシクストゥス4世の姿が描かれていたことが判っており、パッツィ家の陰謀により実父を殺されたクレメンス7世による、事件の黒幕とされるシクストゥス4世への復讐であった可能性が指摘されている。

『最後の審判』には400名以上の人物が描かれている。中央では再臨したイエス・キリストが死者に裁きを下しており、向かって左側には天国へと昇天していく人々が、右側には地獄へと堕ちていく人々が描写されている。右下の水面に浮かんだ舟の上で、亡者に向かって櫂を振りかざしているのは冥府の渡し守カロンであり、この舟に乗せられた死者は、アケローン川を渡って地獄の各階層へと振り分けられていくという。ミケランジェロはこの地獄風景を描くのに、ダンテの『神曲』地獄篇のイメージを借りた。

群像に裸体が多く、儀典長からこの点を非難され、「着衣をさせよ」という勧告が出されたこともある。ミケランジェロはこれを怨んで、地獄に自分の芸術を理解しなかった儀典長を配したというエピソードもある。さらにこの件に対して儀典長がパウルス3世に抗議したところ、「煉獄はともかく、地獄では私は何の権限も無い」と冗談交じりに受け流されたという。また、キリストの右下には自身の生皮を持つバルトロマイが描かれているが、この生皮はミケランジェロの自画像とされる。 また画面左下方に、ミケランジェロが青年時代に説教を聴いたとされるサヴォナローラらしき人物も描かれている。

『最後の審判』などの壁画・天井画は、長年のすすで汚れていたが、日本テレビの支援により1981年から1994年までに修復作業が行われた。壁画・天井画は洗浄され製作当時の鮮やかな色彩が蘇った。ミケランジェロの死後、裸体を隠すために幾つかの衣装が書き込まれていたが、これは一部を除いて元の姿に復元された。

徳島県鳴門市の大塚国際美術館には実物大のレプリカが展示されている。 京都府京都市の京都府立陶板名画の庭にも、陶器製のほぼ原寸大のレプリカが展示されている。

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Judgment_(Michelangelo)

https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%9C%80%E5%BE%8C%E3%81%AE%E5%AF%A9%E5%88%A4_(%E3%83%9F%E3%82%B1%E3%83%A9%E3%83%B3%E3%82%B8%E3%82%A7%E3%83%AD)

http://www.giacobbegiusti.com

Giacobbe Giusti: Head of Julius Caesar

Giacobbe Giusti: Head of Julius Caesar

 

 
Rose Scott
Head of Julius Caesar from the Trajan’s forum. Marble. A.D. 117—138. Inv. No. 6038. Naples, National Archaeological Museum. Origin: From the Farnese collection.

http://www.giacobbegiusti.com

Giacobbe Giusti: Power and Pathos in Florence

Giacobbe Giusti: Power and Pathos in Florence

Il Sole 24 Ore Digital Edition

by

Firenze first international stop of the Hellenistic bronzes

by  Marco Carminati

1. 

   Head of an athlete (Apoxyomenos), bronze, Fort Worth, Kimbell Art Museum  <!–Credit: Il Sole 24 Ore–>4/5

2. 

   Head of Apollo, bronze, Salerno, Provincial Archaeological Museum   <!–Credit: Il Sole 24 Ore–>5/5

3. 

   Alexander the Great on his horse, bronze with silver inlays, Naples, National Archaeological Museum   <!–Credit: Il Sole 24 Ore–>1/5

4. 

   Athena (Minerva of Arezzo), bronze, Florence, National Archaeological Museum  <!–Credit: Il Sole 24 Ore–>2/5

5. 

   Statue of an aristocratic boy, bronze, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art  <!–Credit: Il Sole 24 Ore–>3/5

Fifty bronze statues from the Hellenistic era, between the 4th and 1st centuries BC, are on show until June 21 in an exhibition in Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, entitled “Power and Pathos. Bronzes in the Hellenistic world.”

The exhibition is organized in collaboration with the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the National Gallery in Washington and the Archaeological Superintendence of Tuscany. An exhibition that, after Florence, will move to the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles (July 28-November 1) and the National Gallery in Washington (6 December 2015-20 March 2016).

With artworks loaned from all over the world, the exhibition opens with a marble base statue from Corinth, on which a bronze statue was standing.

On the base, a signature in Greek reads:“Lysippos made.” Here, then, rose one of the 1,500 sculptures that – according to ancient sources – Greek sculptor Lysippos modeled, and none of which has survived in original copy.

Behind Lysippos’ base, there is the Arringatore (“The Orator”) of the Archaeological Museum of Florence, a bronze from the 2nd century BC discovered in 1566 near Lake Trasimeno, in Umbria. It is a statue of Hellenistic style, dressed in Roman clothing and bearing an Etruscan inscription.

The second section (entitled “Portraits of Power”) is dedicated to the figure of Alexander the Great and the art inspired by him: massive equestrian groups were meant to immortalize the military greatness and the heroism of the king and his huge empire.

Apart from highlighting the exceptional anatomic qualities of the Hellenistic bronzes, (it is said that Lysistratus, Lysippos’ brother, carved the models from living bodies), the exhibition shows that all those statues of monarchs, heroes, gods, athletes, citizens and matrons were used to decorate big public buildings, as “ex voto” offerings in sanctuaries, as domestic votive figures. The singular Hercules from the Archaeological Museum of Naples, found in a villa of the Vesuvian area, still sitting on his original base made of limestone, is one of the most famous examples.

If they were so popular, why did the Hellenistic bronze sculptures almost completely disappear? The bronze itself could be recast. Already by Roman times ancient statues were melted to make other ones. How could the surviving statues have escaped? Sea journeys ended up in shipwreck, or eruptions like that of Mount Vesuvius have saved the Hellenistic bronze statues from the fate of melting.

(“Power and Pathos. Bronzes of the Hellenistic world,” Florence, Palazzo Strozzi, until June 21)

http://www.italy24.ilsole24ore.com/art/arts-and-leisure/2015-03-16/bronzi-firenze-172800.php?uuid=ABi16w9C

Giacobbe Giusti: Power and Pathos

Giacobbe Giusti: Power and Pathos

Blockbuster ‘Power and Pathos’ Exhibit to Open in Florence

An extensive new show brings together 50 ancient bronze masterpieces

‘Eros Sleeping,’ third-second century B.C., New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. | Unlike earlier portrayals of Eros as a fickle youth, this version emphasizes purity in the form of sleeping baby. Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource/Scala, Firenze

  

‘Alexander the Great,’ first century B.C., Naples, Museo Archeologico Nazionale. | This piece impressed ancient authors with its unprecedented realism. Soprintendenza per i Beni Archeologici di Napoli …

‘Terme Boxer,’ third century B.C., Rome, Museo Nazionale Romano di Palazzo Massimo. | One of the most famous ancient sculptures–a masterpiece of scarred and beaten realism. Museo Nazionale Romano …

‘Portrait of a Man,’ second-first century B.C., Athens, National Archaeological Museum. | Informally called the Worried Man from Delos, this piece is known for its emotional intensity and individuality. National Archaeological Museum, Athens/Art Resource, NY …

‘Head of athlete,’ second century B.C.-first century A.D, Fort Worth, Kimbell Art Museum. | Remarkably well preserved–it may be one of the few ancient bronzes that was never buried. Kimbell Art Museum/Art Resource, NY/Scala, Firenze …

‘Portrait of a poet (Aruendel head),’ second or first century B.C., London, British Museum. | An arresting portrait of an old man, concentrating intensely. © The Trustees of the British Museum …

By

Eben Shapiro

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.”

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

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Giacobbe Giusti: Power and Pathos in Florence

Giacobbe Giusti: Power and Pathos in Florence

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.

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Giacobbe Giusti: Power and Pathos in Florence

Giacobbe Giusti: Power and Pathos in Florence

‘Alexander the Great,’ first century B.C., Naples, Museo Archeologico Nazionale. | This piece impressed ancient authors with its unprecedented realism. Soprintendenza per i Beni Archeologici di Napoli …

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