Giacobbe Giusti, Giovanni Francesco Toscani: Vierge à l’Enfant

 

Giacobbe Giusti, Giovanni Francesco Toscani: Vierge à l’Enfant

 

User:Vignaccia76

Giacobbe Giusti, Giovanni Francesco Toscani: Vierge à l’Enfant

Madonna col Bambino, sinopia, chiesa di Santa Maria, Mercatale Val di Pesa

Naissance	1372 Florence
Décès	2 mai 1430 Florence
Activité	Peintre
Lieu de travail	Florence

Maestro della Crocifissione Griggest le pseudonyme attribué¹ à Giovanni di Francesco Toscani (Florence, vers 1372 – Florence, 2 mai 1430), un peintre italien de la première Renaissance, principalement peintre de panneaux de cassoni.

Biographie

Fils de Francesco Toscani, Giovanni di Francesco Toscani se fixe à Florence dans le district San Giovanni, quartier du dragon, comme le précise le cadastre de 1427.

Il est inscrit à la Compagnie de San Luca des peintres de Florence en 1424. Des documents attestent le paiement en 1423 et 1424 de travaux d’ameublement réalisés à la Chapelle Ardinghelli dans la Basilique Santa Trinita.

Il est noté surtout comme décorateur de cassoni.

Il meurt à Florence le 2 mai 1430.

Panneaux decassoni

• Scene di vita di corte, Kress Collection, Washington,
• Palio di Firenze (1428) Museum of Art, Cleveland,
• Palio di Firenze (1429), musée national du Bargello, Florence,
• Cassone di Edinburgo, National Gallery of Scotland, Édimbourg.

Tableaux

• Madonna con Bambino (1422-1423), fond doré, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence ;
• Museo dello Spedale degli Innocenti, Florence :
  • Madonna con Bambino, Annunciazione, Cristo Crocifisso, Dolenti, Pietà ed Angeli (1410-1420), triptyque,
  • Angelo (1410-1420),
  • Pietà (1410-1420),
  • Santa Caterina d’Alessandria, Madonna Annunciata (1410-1420) ;

• Galleria dell’Accademia de Florence :
  • Incredulità di San Tommaso Apostolo (1419-1420),
  • San Francesco d’Assisi riceve le stimmate, San Nicola di Bari placa una tempesta marina (1423-1424),
  • Madonna con Bambino, Santi (1423-1424),
  • Cristo crocifisso, dolenti, angeli (1423-1424) ;
• Madonna col Bambino, sinopia, chiesa di Santa Maria, Mercatale frazione de San Casciano in Val di Pesa ;
• Crocifissione, Lowe Museum, Coral Gables ;
• Adorazione dei Magi et Madonna col Bambino, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne ;
• Crocifissione con scene della vita e passione di San Giovanni, Memphis Brooks Museum, Memphis ;
• Madone de l’humilité, d’abord attribuée à Masolino da Panicalepuis à Toscani par Bellosi en 1966².

Sur les autres projets Wikimedia :

• Maestro della Crocifissione Grigg, sur Wikimedia Commons

• (it) Cet article est partiellement ou en totalité issu de l’article de Wikipédia en italien intitulé « Maestro della Crocifissione Grigg » (voir la liste des auteurs).

Bibliographie

• Répertoire de la Fondation Roberto Longhi
• Luciano Bellosi, Il Maestro della Crocifissione Griggs : Giovanni Toscani, in « Paragone », 1966, 193, pp. 44–58.

Notes et références

1. ↑ pour son œuvre la plus célèbre, un crucifix conservé un temps dans la collection Griggs et puis au Metropolitan Museum of Art de New York.
2. ↑ Notice et image [archive]

• La page des maîtres anonymes, qui justifie cette appellation de Maestro della Crocifissione Grigg.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Vignaccia76

http://www.giacobbegiusti.com

Giacobbe Giusti, Quintus Horatius Flaccus, Roman lyric poet during the time of Augustus

Giacobbe Giusti, Quintus Horatius Flaccus,  Roman lyric poet during the time of Augustus

 

Ausschnitt aus dem Fresko Der Parnass von Raffael, ca. 1508–1511 gemalt. Die vorne stehende männliche Figur wird als Horaz gedeutet.

Giacobbe Giusti, Quintus Horatius Flaccus,  Roman lyric poet during the time of Augustus

Horace in his Studium: German print of the fifteenth century, summarizing the final ode 4.15 (in praise of Augustus).

Giacobbe Giusti, Quintus Horatius Flaccus,  Roman lyric poet during the time of Augustus

Horace reads before Maecenas, by Fyodor Bronnikov

Giacobbe Giusti, Quintus Horatius Flaccus,  Roman lyric poet during the time of Augustus

A poem of the Roman lyric poet Horace on a wall of the building at the Cleveringaplaats 1, Leiden, The Netherlands

Giacobbe Giusti, Quintus Horatius Flaccus,  Roman lyric poet during the time of Augustus

Ernst Fries, Blick in die Sabinerberge östlich von Licenza, Öl auf Mahagoni, 1827

 

Quintus Horatius Flaccus (December 8, 65 BC – November 27, 8 BC), known in the English-speaking world as Horace (/ˈhɒrɪs/), was the leading Roman lyric poet during the time of Augustus (also known as Octavian). The rhetorician Quintilianregarded his Odes as just about the only Latin lyrics worth reading: “He can be lofty sometimes, yet he is also full of charm and grace, versatile in his figures, and felicitously daring in his choice of words.”^{[nb 1]}

Horace also crafted elegant hexameter verses (Satires and Epistles) and caustic iambic poetry (Epodes). The hexameters are amusing yet serious works, friendly in tone, leading the ancient satirist Persius to comment: “as his friend laughs, Horace slyly puts his finger on his every fault; once let in, he plays about the heartstrings”.^{[nb 2]}

His career coincided with Rome’s momentous change from a republicto an empire. An officer in the republican army defeated at the Battle of Philippi in 42 BC, he was befriended by Octavian’s right-hand man in civil affairs, Maecenas, and became a spokesman for the new regime. For some commentators, his association with the regime was a delicate balance in which he maintained a strong measure of independence (he was “a master of the graceful sidestep”)^[1] but for others he was, in John Dryden‘s phrase, “a well-mannered court slave”.^{[2][nb 3]}

Life

Giacobbe Giusti, Quintus Horatius Flaccus,  Roman lyric poet during the time of Augustus

Horatii Flacci Sermonum (1577)

Horace can be regarded as the world’s first autobiographer^[3] – In his writings, he tells us far more about himself, his character, his development, and his way of life than any other great poet in antiquity. Some of the biographical writings contained in his writings can be supplemented from the short but valuable “Life of Horace” by Suetonius (in his Lives of the Poets).^[4]

Childhood

He was born on 8 December 65 BC^{[nb 4]} in the Samnite south of Italy.^[5] His home town, Venusia, lay on a trade route in the border region between Apulia and Lucania(Basilicata). Various Italic dialects were spoken in the area and this perhaps enriched his feeling for language. He could have been familiar with Greek words even as a young boy and later he poked fun at the jargon of mixed Greek and Oscan spoken in neighbouring Canusium.^[6] One of the works he probably studied in school was the Odyssia of Livius Andronicus, taught by teachers like the ‘Orbilius‘ mentioned in one of his poems.^[7] Army veterans could have been settled there at the expense of local families uprooted by Rome as punishment for their part in the Social War (91–88 BC).^[8] Such state-sponsored migration must have added still more linguistic variety to the area. According to a local tradition reported by Horace,^[9] a colony of Romans or Latins had been installed in Venusia after the Samniteshad been driven out early in the third century. In that case, young Horace could have felt himself to be a Roman^[10][11] though there are also indications that he regarded himself as a Samnite or Sabellus by birth.^[12][13] Italians in modern and ancient times have always been devoted to their home towns, even after success in the wider world, and Horace was no different. Images of his childhood setting and references to it are found throughout his poems.^[14]

Horace’s father was probably a Venutian taken captive by Romans in the Social War, or possibly he was descended from a Sabine captured in the Samnite Wars. Either way, he was a slave for at least part of his life. He was evidently a man of strong abilities however and managed to gain his freedom and improve his social position. Thus Horace claimed to be the free-born son of a prosperous ‘coactor’.^[15] The term ‘coactor’ could denote various roles, such as tax collector, but its use by Horace^[16] was explained by scholia as a reference to ‘coactor argentareus’ i.e. an auctioneer with some of the functions of a banker, paying the seller out of his own funds and later recovering the sum with interest from the buyer.^[17]

The father spent a small fortune on his son’s education, eventually accompanying him to Rome to oversee his schooling and moral development. The poet later paid tribute to him in a poem^[18] that one modern scholar considers the best memorial by any son to his father.^{[nb 5]} The poem includes this passage:

If my character is flawed by a few minor faults, but is otherwise decent and moral, if you can point out only a few scattered blemishes on an otherwise immaculate surface, if no one can accuse me of greed, or of prurience, or of profligacy, if I live a virtuous life, free of defilement (pardon, for a moment, my self-praise), and if I am to my friends a good friend, my father deserves all the credit… As it is now, he deserves from me unstinting gratitude and praise. I could never be ashamed of such a father, nor do I feel any need, as many people do, to apologize for being a freedman’s son. Satires 1.6.65–92

He never mentioned his mother in his verses and he might not have known much about her. Perhaps she also had been a slave.^[15]

Adulthood

Horace left Rome, possibly after his father’s death, and continued his formal education in Athens, a great centre of learning in the ancient world, where he arrived at nineteen years of age, enrolling in The Academy. Founded by Plato, The Academy was now dominated by Epicureans and Stoics, whose theories and practises made a deep impression on the young man from Venusia.^[19] Meanwhile, he mixed and lounged about with the elite of Roman youth, such as Marcus, the idle son of Cicero, and the Pompeius to whom he later addressed a poem.^[20] It was in Athens too that he probably acquired deep familiarity with the ancient tradition of Greek lyric poetry, at that time largely the preserve of grammarians and academic specialists (access to such material was easier in Athens than in Rome, where the public libraries had yet to be built by Asinius Pollio and Augustus).^[21]

Rome’s troubles following the assassination of Julius Caesar were soon to catch up with him. Marcus Junius Brutus came to Athens seeking support for the republican cause. Brutus was fêted around town in grand receptions and he made a point of attending academic lectures, all the while recruiting supporters among the young men studying there, including Horace.^[22] An educated young Roman could begin military service high in the ranks and Horace was made tribunus militum (one of six senior officers of a typical legion), a post usually reserved for men of senatorial or equestrian rank and which seems to have inspired jealousy among his well-born confederates.^[23][24] He learned the basics of military life while on the march, particularly in the wilds of northern Greece, whose rugged scenery became a backdrop to some of his later poems.^[25] It was there in 42 BC that Octavian(later Augustus) and his associate Mark Antony crushed the republican forces at the Battle of Philippi. Horace later recorded it as a day of embarrassment for himself, when he fled without his shield,^[26]but allowance should be made for his self-deprecating humour. Moreover, the incident allowed him to identify himself with some famous poets who had long ago abandoned their shields in battle, notably his heroes Alcaeus and Archilochus. The comparison with the latter poet is uncanny: Archilochus lost his shield in a part of Thrace near Philippi, and he was deeply involved in the Greek colonization of Thasos, where Horace’s die-hard comrades finally surrendered.^[24]

Octavian offered an early amnesty to his opponents and Horace quickly accepted it. On returning to Italy, he was confronted with yet another loss: his father’s estate in Venusia was one of many throughout Italy to be confiscated for the settlement of veterans (Virgillost his estate in the north about the same time). Horace later claimed that he was reduced to poverty and this led him to try his hand at poetry.^[27] In reality, there was no money to be had from versifying. At best, it offered future prospects through contacts with other poets and their patrons among the rich.^[28] Meanwhile, he obtained the sinecure of scriba quaestorius, a civil service position at the aerarium or Treasury, profitable enough to be purchased even by members of the ordo equester and not very demanding in its work-load, since tasks could be delegated to scribae or permanent clerks.^[29] It was about this time that he began writing his Satires and Epodes.

Poet

Giacobbe Giusti, Quintus Horatius Flaccus,  Roman lyric poet during the time of Augustus

Horace reads before Maecenas, by Fyodor Bronnikov

The Epodes belong to iambic poetry. Iambic poetry features insulting and obscene language;^[30][31] sometimes, it is referred to as blame poetry.^[32] Blame poetry, or shame poetry, is poetry written to blame and shame fellow citizens into a sense of their social obligations. Horace modelled these poems on the poetry of Archilochus. Social bonds in Rome had been decaying since the destruction of Carthage a little more than a hundred years earlier, due to the vast wealth that could be gained by plunder and corruption.^[33]These social ills were magnified by rivalry between Julius Caesar, Mark Antony and confederates like Sextus Pompey, all jockeying for a bigger share of the spoils. One modern scholar has counted a dozen civil wars in the hundred years leading up to 31 BC, including the Spartacus rebellion, eight years before Horace’s birth.^[34] As the heirs to Hellenistic culture, Horace and his fellow Romans were not well prepared to deal with these problems:

At bottom, all the problems that the times were stirring up were of a social nature, which the Hellenistic thinkers were ill qualified to grapple with. Some of them censured oppression of the poor by the rich, but they gave no practical lead, though they may have hoped to see well-meaning rulers doing so. Philosophy was drifting into absorption in self, a quest for private contentedness, to be achieved by self-control and restraint, without much regard for the fate of a disintegrating community.

— V. G. Kiernan^[35]

Horace’s Hellenistic background is clear in his Satires, even though the genre was unique to Latin literature. He brought to it a style and outlook suited to the social and ethical issues confronting Rome but he changed its role from public, social engagement to private meditation.^[36] Meanwhile, he was beginning to interest Octavian’s supporters, a gradual process described by him in one of his satires.^[18] The way was opened for him by his friend, the poet Virgil, who had gained admission into the privileged circle around Maecenas, Octavian’s lieutenant, following the success of his Eclogues. An introduction soon followed and, after a discreet interval, Horace too was accepted. He depicted the process as an honourable one, based on merit and mutual respect, eventually leading to true friendship, and there is reason to believe that his relationship was genuinely friendly, not just with Maecenas but afterwards with Augustus as well.^[37] On the other hand, the poet has been unsympathetically described by one scholar as “a sharp and rising young man, with an eye to the main chance.”^[38] There were advantages on both sides: Horace gained encouragement and material support, the politicians gained a hold on a potential dissident.^[39] His republican sympathies, and his role at Philippi, may have caused him some pangs of remorse over his new status. However most Romans considered the civil wars to be the result of contentio dignitatis, or rivalry between the foremost families of the city, and he too seems to have accepted the principate as Rome’s last hope for much needed peace.^[40]

In 37 BC, Horace accompanied Maecenas on a journey to Brundisium, described in one of his poems^[41] as a series of amusing incidents and charming encounters with other friends along the way, such as Virgil. In fact the journey was political in its motivation, with Maecenas en route to negotiatie the Treaty of Tarentum with Antony, a fact Horace artfully keeps from the reader (political issues are largely avoided in the first book of satires).^[39] Horace was probably also with Maecenas on one of Octavian’s naval expeditions against the piratical Sextus Pompeius, which ended in a disastrous storm off Palinurus in 36 BC, briefly alluded to by Horace in terms of near-drowning.^{[42][nb 6]} There are also some indications in his verses that he was with Maecenas at the Battle of Actium in 31 BC, where Octavian defeated his great rival, Antony.^{[43][nb 7]} By then Horace had already received from Maecenas the famous gift of his Sabine farm, probably not long after the publication of the first book of Satires. The gift, which included income from five tenants, may have ended his career at the Treasury, or at least allowed him to give it less time and energy.^[44] It signalled his identification with the Octavian regime yet, in the second book of Satires that soon followed, he continued the apolitical stance of the first book. By this time, he had attained the status of eques Romanus,^[45] perhaps as a result of his work at the Treasury.^[46]

Knight

Odes 1–3 were the next focus for his artistic creativity. He adapted their forms and themes from Greek lyric poetry of the seventh and sixth centuries BC. The fragmented nature of the Greek world had enabled his literary heroes to express themselves freely and his semi-retirement from the Treasury in Rome to his own estate in the Sabine hills perhaps empowered him to some extent also^[47] yet even when his lyrics touched on public affairs they reinforced the importance of private life.^[1] Nevertheless, his work in the period 30–27 BC began to show his closeness to the regime and his sensitivity to its developing ideology. In Odes 1.2, for example, he eulogized Octavian in hyperboles that echo Hellenistic court poetry. The name Augustus, which Octavian assumed in January 27 BC, is first attested in Odes3.3 and 3.5. In the period 27–24 BC, political allusions in the Odesconcentrated on foreign wars in Britain (1.35), Arabia (1.29) Spain (3.8) and Parthia (2.2). He greeted Augustus on his return to Rome in 24 BC as a beloved ruler upon whose good health he depended for his own happiness (3.14).^[48]

The public reception of Odes 1–3 disappointed him however. He attributed the lack of success to jealousy among imperial courtiers and to his isolation from literary cliques.^[49] Perhaps it was disappointment that led him to put aside the genre in favour of verse letters. He addressed his first book of Epistles to a variety of friends and acquaintances in an urbane style reflecting his new social status as a knight. In the opening poem, he professed a deeper interest in moral philosophy than poetry^[50] but, though the collection demonstrates a leaning towards stoic theory, it reveals no sustained thinking about ethics.^[51] Maecenas was still the dominant confidante but Horace had now begun to assert his own independence, suavely declining constant invitations to attend his patron.^[52] In the final poem of the first book of Epistles, he revealed himself to be forty-four years old in the consulship of Lollius and Lepidus i.e. 21 BC, and “of small stature, fond of the sun, prematurely grey, quick-tempered but easily placated”.^[53][54]

According to Suetonius, the second book of Epistles was prompted by Augustus, who desired a verse epistle to be addressed to himself. Augustus was in fact a prolific letter-writer and he once asked Horace to be his personal secretary. Horace refused the secretarial role but complied with the emperor’s request for a verse letter.^[55] The letter to Augustus may have been slow in coming, being published possibly as late as 11 BC. It celebrated, among other things, the 15 BC military victories of his stepsons, Drusus and Tiberius, yet it and the following letter^[56] were largely devoted to literary theory and criticism. The literary theme was explored still further in Ars Poetica, published separately but written in the form of an epistle and sometimes referred to as Epistles 2.3 (possibly the last poem he ever wrote).^[57] He was also commissioned to write odes commemorating the victories of Drusus and Tiberius^[58] and one to be sung in a temple of Apollo for the Secular Games, a long abandoned festival that Augustus revived in accordance with his policy of recreating ancient customs (Carmen Saeculare).

Suetonius recorded some gossip about Horace’s sexual activities late in life, claiming that the walls of his bedchamber were covered with obscene pictures and mirrors, so that he saw erotica wherever he looked.^{[nb 8]} The poet died at 56 years of age, not long after his friend Maecenas, near whose tomb he was laid to rest. Both men bequeathed their property to Augustus, an honour that the emperor expected of his friends.^[59]

Works

Giacobbe Giusti, Quintus Horatius Flaccus,  Roman lyric poet during the time of Augustus

Odes 1.14 – Wall poem in Leiden

The dating of Horace’s works isn’t known precisely and scholars often debate the exact order in which they were first ‘published’. There are persuasive arguments for the following chronology:^[60]

• Satires 1 (c. 35–34 BC)
• Satires 2 (c. 30 BC)
• Epodes (30 BC)
• Odes 1–3 (c. 23 BC)^{[nb 9]}
• Epistles 1 (c. 21 BC)
• Carmen Saeculare (17 BC)
• Epistles 2 (c. 11 BC)^{[nb 10]}
• Odes 4 (c. 11 BC)
• Ars Poetica (c. 10–8 BC)^{[nb 11]}

Historical context

Horace composed in traditional metres borrowed from Archaic Greece, employing hexameters in his Satires and Epistles, and iambs in his Epodes, all of which were relatively easy to adapt into Latin forms. His Odes featured more complex measures, including alcaics and sapphics, which were sometimes a difficult fit for Latin structure and syntax. Despite these traditional metres, he presented himself as a partisan in the development of a new and sophisticated style. He was influenced in particular by Hellenistic aesthetics of brevity, elegance and polish, as modeled in the work of Callimachus.^[61]

As soon as Horace, stirred by his own genius and encouraged by the example of Virgil, Varius, and perhaps some other poets of the same generation, had determined to make his fame as a poet, being by temperament a fighter, he wanted to fight against all kinds of prejudice, amateurish slovenliness, philistinism, reactionary tendencies, in short to fight for the new and noble type of poetry which he and his friends were endeavouring to bring about.

— Eduard Fraenkel^[62]

In modern literary theory, a distinction is often made between immediate personal experience (Urerlebnis) and experience mediated by cultural vectors such as literature, philosophy and the visual arts (Bildungserlebnis).^[63] The distinction has little relevance for Horace^{[citation needed]} however since his personal and literary experiences are implicated in each other. Satires 1.5, for example, recounts in detail a real trip Horace made with Virgil and some of his other literary friends, and which parallels a Satire by Lucilius, his predecessor.^[64] Unlike much Hellenistic-inspired literature, however, his poetry was not composed for a small coterie of admirers and fellow poets, nor does it rely on abstruse allusions for many of its effects. Though elitist in its literary standards, it was written for a wide audience, as a public form of art.^[65] Ambivalence also characterizes his literary persona, since his presentation of himself as part of a small community of philosophically aware people, seeking true peace of mind while shunning vices like greed, was well adapted to Augustus’s plans to reform public morality, corrupted by greed – his personal plea for moderation was part of the emperor’s grand message to the nation.^[66]

Horace generally followed the examples of poets established as classics in different genres, such as Archilochus in the Epodes, Lucilius in the Satires and Alcaeus in the Odes, later broadening his scope for the sake of variation and because his models weren’t actually suited to the realities confronting him. Archilochus and Alcaeus were aristocratic Greeks whose poetry had a social and religious function that was immediately intelligible to their audiences but which became a mere artifice or literary motif when transposed to Rome. However, the artifice of the Odes is also integral to their success, since they could now accommodate a wide range of emotional effects, and the blend of Greek and Roman elements adds a sense of detachment and universality.^[67] Horace proudly claimed to introduce into Latin the spirit and iambic poetry of Archilochus but (unlike Archilochus) without persecuting anyone (Epistles 1.19.23–5). It was no idle boast. His Epodes were modeled on the verses of the Greek poet, as ‘blame poetry’, yet he avoided targeting real scapegoats. Whereas Archilochus presented himself as a serious and vigorous opponent of wrong-doers, Horace aimed for comic effects and adopted the persona of a weak and ineffectual critic of his times (as symbolized for example in his surrender to the witch Canidia in the final epode).^[68] He also claimed to be the first to introduce into Latin the lyrical methods of Alcaeus (Epistles 1.19.32–3) and he actually was the first Latin poet to make consistent use of Alcaic meters and themes: love, politics and the symposium. He imitated other Greek lyric poets as well, employing a ‘motto’ technique, beginning each ode with some reference to a Greek original and then diverging from it.^[69]

The satirical poet Lucilius was a senator’s son who could castigate his peers with impunity. Horace was a mere freedman’s son who had to tread carefully.^[70] Lucilius was a rugged patriot and a significant voice in Roman self-awareness, endearing himself to his countrymen by his blunt frankness and explicit politics. His work expressed genuine freedom or libertas. His style included ‘metrical vandalism’ and looseness of structure. Horace instead adopted an oblique and ironic style of satire, ridiculing stock characters and anonymous targets. His libertas was the private freedom of a philosophical outlook, not a political or social privilege.^[71] His Satires are relatively easy-going in their use of meter (relative to the tight lyric meters of the Odes)^[72] but formal and highly controlled relative to the poems of Lucilius, whom Horace mocked for his sloppy standards (Satires 1.10.56–61)^{[nb 12]}

The Epistles may be considered among Horace’s most innovative works. There was nothing like it in Greek or Roman literature. Occasionally poems had had some resemblance to letters, including an elegiac poem from Solon to Mimnermus and some lyrical poems from Pindar to Hieron of Syracuse. Lucilius had composed a satire in the form of a letter, and some epistolary poems were composed by Catullus and Propertius. But nobody before Horace had ever composed an entire collection of verse letters,^[73] let alone letters with a focus on philosophical problems. The sophisticated and flexible style that he had developed in his Satires was adapted to the more serious needs of this new genre.^[74] Such refinement of style was not unusual for Horace. His craftsmanship as a wordsmith is apparent even in his earliest attempts at this or that kind of poetry, but his handling of each genre tended to improve over time as he adapted it to his own needs.^[70] Thus for example it is generally agreed that his second book of Satires, where human folly is revealed through dialogue between characters, is superior to the first, where he propounds his ethics in monologues. Nevertheless, the first book includes some of his most popular poems.^[75]

Themes

Horace developed a number of inter-related themes throughout his poetic career, including politics, love, philosophy and ethics, his own social role, as well as poetry itself. His Epodes and Satires are forms of ‘blame poetry’ and both have a natural affinity with the moralising and diatribes of Cynicism. This often takes the form of allusions to the work and philosophy of Bion of Borysthenes ^{[nb 13]} but it is as much a literary game as a philosophical alignment. By the time he composed his Epistles, he was a critic of Cynicism along with all impractical and “high-falutin” philosophy in general.^{[nb 14][76]} The Satires also include a strong element of Epicureanism, with frequent allusions to the Epicurean poet Lucretius.^{[nb 15]} So for example the Epicurean sentiment carpe diem is the inspiration behind Horace’s repeated punning on his own name (Horatius ~ hora) in Satires 2.6.^[77] The Satires also feature some Stoic, Peripatetic and Platonic (Dialogues) elements. In short, the Satires present a medley of philosophical programs, dished up in no particular order – a style of argument typical of the genre.^[78] The Odes display a wide range of topics. Over time, he becomes more confident about his political voice.^[79] Although he is often thought of as an overly intellectual lover, he is ingenuous in representing passion.^[80] The “Odes” weave various philosophical strands together, with allusions and statements of doctrine present in about a third of the Odes Books 1–3, ranging from the flippant (1.22, 3.28) to the solemn (2.10, 3.2, 3.3). Epicureanism is the dominant influence, characterizing about twice as many of these odes as Stoicism. A group of odes combines these two influences in tense relationships, such as Odes 1.7, praising Stoic virility and devotion to public duty while also advocating private pleasures among friends. While generally favouring the Epicurean lifestyle, the lyric poet is as eclectic as the satiric poet, and in Odes 2.10 even proposes Aristotle’s golden mean as a remedy for Rome’s political troubles.^[81] Many of Horace’s poems also contain much reflection on genre, the lyric tradition, and the function of poetry.^[82] Odes 4, thought to be composed at the emperor’s request, takes the themes of the first three books of “Odes” to a new level. This book shows greater poetic confidence after the public performance of his “Carmen saeculare” or “Century hymn” at a public festival orchestrated by Augustus. In it, Horace addresses the emperor Augustus directly with more confidence and proclaims his power to grant poetic immortality to those he praises. It is the least philosophical collection of his verses, excepting the twelfth ode, addressed to the dead Virgil as if he were living. In that ode, the epic poet and the lyric poet are aligned with Stoicism and Epicureanism respectively, in a mood of bitter-sweet pathos.^[83] The first poem of the Epistles sets the philosophical tone for the rest of the collection: “So now I put aside both verses and all those other games: What is true and what befits is my care, this my question, this my whole concern.” His poetic renunciation of poetry in favour of philosophy is intended to be ambiguous. Ambiguity is the hallmark of the Epistles. It is uncertain if those being addressed by the self-mocking poet-philosopher are being honoured or criticized. Though he emerges as an Epicurean, it is on the understanding that philosophical preferences, like political and social choices, are a matter of personal taste. Thus he depicts the ups and downs of the philosophical life more realistically than do most philosophers.^[84]

Reception

Giacobbe Giusti, Quintus Horatius Flaccus,  Roman lyric poet during the time of Augustus

Horace, portrayed by Giacomo Di Chirico

The reception of Horace’s work has varied from one epoch to another and varied markedly even in his own lifetime. Odes 1–3 were not well received when first ‘published’ in Rome, yet Augustus later commissioned a ceremonial ode for the Centennial Games in 17 BC and also encouraged the publication of Odes 4, after which Horace’s reputation as Rome’s premier lyricist was assured. His Odes were to become the best received of all his poems in ancient times, acquiring a classic status that discouraged imitation: no other poet produced a comparable body of lyrics in the four centuries that followed^[85] (though that might also be attributed to social causes, particularly the parasitism that Italy was sinking into).^[86] In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, ode-writing became highly fashionable in England and a large number of aspiring poets imitated Horace both in English and in Latin.^[87]

In a verse epistle to Augustus (Epistle 2.1), in 12 BC, Horace argued for classic status to be awarded to contemporary poets, including Virgil and apparently himself.^[88] In the final poem of his third book of Odes he claimed to have created for himself a monument more durable than bronze (“Exegi monumentum aere perennius”, Carmina 3.30.1). For one modern scholar, however, Horace’s personal qualities are more notable than the monumental quality of his achievement:

…when we hear his name we don’t really think of a monument. We think rather of a voice which varies in tone and resonance but is always recognizable, and which by its unsentimental humanity evokes a very special blend of liking and respect.

— Niall Rudd^[89]

Yet for men like Wilfred Owen, scarred by experiences of World War I, his poetry stood for discredited values:

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The Old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.^{[nb 16]}

The same motto, Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, had been adapted to the ethos of martyrdom in the lyrics of early Christian poets like Prudentius.^[90]

These preliminary comments touch on a small sample of developments in the reception of Horace’s work. More developments are covered epoch by epoch in the following sections.

Antiquity

Horace’s influence can be observed in the work of his near contemporaries, Ovid and Propertius. Ovid followed his example in creating a completely natural style of expression in hexameter verse, and Propertius cheekily mimicked him in his third book of elegies.^{[nb 17]} His Epistles provided them both with a model for their own verse letters and it also shaped Ovid’s exile poetry.^{[nb 18]}

His influence had a perverse aspect. As mentioned before, the brilliance of his Odes may have discouraged imitation. Conversely, they may have created a vogue for the lyrics of the archaic Greek poet Pindar, due to the fact that Horace had neglected that style of lyric (see Pindar#Influence and legacy).^[91] The iambic genre seems almost to have disappeared after publication of Horace’s Epodes. Ovid’s Ibiswas a rare attempt at the form but it was inspired mainly by Callimachus, and there are some iambic elements in Martial but the main influence there was Catullus.^[92] A revival of popular interest in the satires of Lucilius may have been inspired by Horace’s criticism of his unpolished style. Both Horace and Lucilius were considered good role-models by Persius, who critiqued his own satires as lacking both the acerbity of Lucillius and the gentler touch of Horace.^{[nb 19]}Juvenal‘s caustic satire was influenced mainly by Lucilius but Horace by then was a school classic and Juvenal could refer to him respectfully and in a round-about way as “the Venusine lamp“.^{[nb 20]}

Statius paid homage to Horace by composing one poem in Sapphic and one in Alcaic meter (the verse forms most often associated with Odes), which he included in his collection of occasional poems, Silvae. Ancient scholars wrote commentaries on the lyric meters of the Odes, including the scholarly poet Caesius Bassus. By a process called derivatio, he varied established meters through the addition or omission of syllables, a technique borrowed by Seneca the Youngerwhen adapting Horatian meters to the stage.^[93]

Horace’s poems continued to be school texts into late antiquity. Works attributed to Helenius Acro and Pomponius Porphyrio are the remnants of a much larger body of Horatian scholarship. Porphyrio arranged the poems in non-chronological order, beginning with the Odes, because of their general popularity and their appeal to scholars (the Odes were to retain this privileged position in the medieval manuscript tradition and thus in modern editions also). Horace was often evoked by poets of the fourth century, such as Ausonius and Claudian. Prudentius presented himself as a Christian Horace, adapting Horatian meters to his own poetry and giving Horatian motifs a Christian tone.^{[nb 21]} On the other hand, St Jerome, modelled an uncompromising response to the pagan Horace, observing: “What harmony can there be between Christ and the Devil? What has Horace to do with the Psalter?“^{[nb 22]} By the early sixth century, Horace and Prudentius were both part of a classical heritage that was struggling to survive the disorder of the times. Boethius, the last major author of classical Latin literature, could still take inspiration from Horace, sometimes mediated by Senecan tragedy.^[94] It can be argued that Horace’s influence extended beyond poetry to dignify core themes and values of the early Christian era, such as self-sufficiency, inner contentment and courage.^{[nb 23]}

Middle Ages and Renaissance

Giacobbe Giusti, Quintus Horatius Flaccus,  Roman lyric poet during the time of Augustus

Horace in his Studium: German print of the fifteenth century, summarizing the final ode 4.15 (in praise of Augustus).

Classical texts almost ceased being copied in the period between the mid sixth century and the Carolingian revival. Horace’s work probably survived in just two or three books imported into northern Europe from Italy. These became the ancestors of six extant manuscripts dated to the ninth century. Two of those six manuscripts are French in origin, one was produced in Alsace, and the other three show Irish influence but were probably written in continental monasteries (Lombardy for example).^[95] By the last half of the ninth century, it was not uncommon for literate people to have direct experience of Horace’s poetry. His influence on the Carolingian Renaissance can be found in the poems of Heiric of Auxerre^{[nb 24]} and in some manuscripts marked with neumes, mysterious notations that may have been an aid to the memorization and discussion of his lyric meters. Ode 4.11 is neumed with the melody of a hymn to John the Baptist, Ut queant laxis, composed in Sapphic stanzas. This hymn later became the basis of the solfege system (Do, re, mi…)—an association with western music quite appropriate for a lyric poet like Horace, though the language of the hymn is mainly Prudentian.^[96]Lyons^[97] argues that the melody in question was linked with Horace’s Ode well before Guido d’Arezzo fitted Ut queant laxis to it. However, the melody is unlikely to be a survivor from classical times, although Ovid^[98] testifies to Horace’s use of the lyre while performing his Odes.

The German scholar, Ludwig Traube, once dubbed the tenth and eleventh centuries The age of Horace (aetas Horatiana), and placed it between the aetas Vergiliana of the eighth and ninth centuries, and the aetas Ovidiana of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, a distinction supposed to reflect the dominant classical Latin influences of those times. Such a distinction is over-schematized since Horace was a substantial influence in the ninth century as well. Traube had focused too much on Horace’s Satires.^[99] Almost all of Horace’s work found favor in the Medieval period. In fact medieval scholars were also guilty of over-schematism, associating Horace’s different genres with the different ages of man. A twelfth century scholar encapsulated the theory: “…Horace wrote four different kinds of poems on account of the four ages, the Odes for boys, the Ars Poetica for young men, the Satires for mature men, the Epistles for old and complete men.”^[100] It was even thought that Horace had composed his works in the order in which they had been placed by ancient scholars.^{[nb 25]} Despite its naivety, the schematism involved an appreciation of Horace’s works as a collection, the Ars Poetica, Satires and Epistles appearing to find favour as well as the Odes. The later Middle Ages however gave special significance to Satires and Epistles, being considered Horace’s mature works. Dante referred to Horace as Orazio satiro, and he awarded him a privileged position in the first circle of Hell, with Homer, Ovid and Lucan.^[101]

Horace’s popularity is revealed in the large number of quotes from all his works found in almost every genre of medieval literature, and also in the number of poets imitating him in quantitative Latin meter . The most prolific imitator of his Odes was the Bavarian monk, Metellus of Tegernsee, who dedicated his work to the patron saint of Tegernsee Abbey, St Quirinus, around the year 1170. He imitated all Horace’s lyrical meters then followed these up with imitations of other meters used by Prudentius and Boethius, indicating that variety, as first modelled by Horace, was considered a fundamental aspect of the lyric genre. The content of his poems however was restricted to simple piety.^[102] Among the most successful imitators of Satires and Epistleswas another Germanic author, calling himself Sextus Amarcius, around 1100, who composed four books, the first two exemplifying vices, the second pair mainly virtues.^[103]

Petrarch is a key figure in the imitation of Horace in accentual meters. His verse letters in Latin were modelled on the Epistles and he wrote a letter to Horace in the form of an ode. However he also borrowed from Horace when composing his Italian sonnets. One modern scholar has speculated that authors who imitated Horace in accentual rhythms (including stressed Latin and vernacular languages) may have considered their work a natural sequel to Horace’s metrical variety.^[104]In France, Horace and Pindar were the poetic models for a group of vernacular authors called the Pléiade, including for example Pierre de Ronsard and Joachim du Bellay. Montaigne made constant and inventive use of Horatian quotes.^[105] The vernacular languages were dominant in Spain and Portugal in the sixteenth century, where Horace’s influence is notable in the works of such authors as Garcilaso de la Vega, Juan Boscán Sá de Miranda, Antonio Ferreira and Fray Luis de León, the latter for example writing odes on the Horatian theme beatus ille (happy the man).^[106] The sixteenth century in western Europe was also an age of translations (except in Germany, where Horace wasn’t translated until well into the seventeenth century). The first English translator was Thomas Drant, who placed translations of Jeremiah and Horace side by side in Medicinable Morall, 1566. That was also the year that the Scot George Buchananparaphrased the Psalms in a Horatian setting. Ben Jonson put Horace on the stage in 1601 in Poetaster, along with other classical Latin authors, giving them all their own verses to speak in translation. Horace’s part evinces the independent spirit, moral earnestness and critical insight that many readers look for in his poems.^[107]

Age of Enlightenment

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, or the Age of Enlightenment, neo-classical culture was pervasive. English literature in the middle of that period has been dubbed Augustan. It is not always easy to distinguish Horace’s influence during those centuries (the mixing of influences is shown for example in one poet’s pseudonym, Horace Juvenal).^{[nb 26]} However a measure of his influence can be found in the diversity of the people interested in his works, both among readers and authors.^[108]

New editions of his works were published almost yearly. There were three new editions in 1612 (two in Leiden, one in Frankfurt) and again in 1699 (Utrecht, Barcelona, Cambridge). Cheap editions were plentiful and fine editions were also produced, including one whose entire text was engraved by John Pine in copperplate. The poet James Thomson owned five editions of Horace’s work and the physician James Douglas had five hundred books with Horace-related titles. Horace was often commended in periodicals such as The Spectator, as a hallmark of good judgement, moderation and manliness, a focus for moralising.^{[nb 27]} His verses offered a fund of mottoes, such as simplex munditiis, (elegance in simplicity) splendide mendax (nobly untruthful.), sapere aude, nunc est bibendum, carpe diem (the latter perhaps being the only one still in common use today),^[94] quoted even in works as prosaic as Edmund Quincy‘s A treatise of hemp-husbandry(1765). The fictional hero Tom Jones recited his verses with feeling.^[109] His works were also used to justify commonplace themes, such as patriotic obedience, as in James Parry’s English lines from an Oxford University collection in 1736:^[110]

What friendly Muse will teach my Lays
To emulate the Roman fire?
Justly to sound a Caeser’s praise
Demands a bold Horatian lyre.

Horatian-style lyrics were increasingly typical of Oxford and Cambridge verse collections for this period, most of them in Latin but some like the previous ode in English. John Milton‘s Lycidas first appeared in such a collection. It has few Horatian echoes^{[nb 28]} yet Milton’s associations with Horace were lifelong. He composed a controversial version of Odes 1.5, and Paradise Lost includes references to Horace’s ‘Roman’ Odes 3.1–6 (Book 7 for example begins with echoes of Odes 3.4).^[111] Yet Horace’s lyrics could offer inspiration to libertines as well as moralists, and neo-Latin sometimes served as a kind of discrete veil for the risqué. Thus for example Benjamin Loveling authored a catalogue of Drury Lane and Covent Garden prostitutes, in Sapphic stanzas, and an encomium for a dying lady “of salacious memory”.^[112] Some Latin imitations of Horace were politically subversive, such as a marriage ode by Anthony Alsop that included a rallying cry for the Jacobite cause. On the other hand, Andrew Marvell took inspiration from Horace’s Odes 1.37 to compose his English masterpiece Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland, in which subtly nuanced reflections on the execution of Charles I echo Horace’s ambiguous response to the death of Cleopatra (Marvell’s ode was suppressed in spite of its subtlety and only began to be widely published in 1776). Samuel Johnson took particular pleasure in reading The Odes.^{[nb 29]} Alexander Pope wrote direct Imitations of Horace (published with the original Latin alongside) and also echoed him in Essays and The Rape of the Lock. He even emerged as “a quite Horatian Homer” in his translation of the Iliad.^[113]Horace appealed also to female poets, such as Anna Seward (Original sonnets on various subjects, and odes paraphrased from Horace, 1799) and Elizabeth Tollet, who composed a Latin ode in Sapphic meter to celebrate her brother’s return from overseas, with tea and coffee substituted for the wine of Horace’s sympotic settings:

Quos procax nobis numeros, jocosque Musa dictaret? mihi dum tibique Temperent baccis Arabes, vel herbis Pocula Seres[114]

What verses and jokes might the bold Muse dictate? while for you and me Arabs flavour our cups with beans Or Chinese with leaves.[115]

Horace’s Ars Poetica is second only to Aristotle’s Poetics in its influence on literary theory and criticism. Milton recommended both works in his treatise of Education.^[116] Horace’s Satires and Epistleshowever also had a huge impact, influencing theorists and critics such as John Dryden.^[117] There was considerable debate over the value of different lyrical forms for contemporary poets, as represented on one hand by the kind of four-line stanzas made familiar by Horace’s Sapphic and Alcaic Odes and, on the other, the loosely structured Pindarics associated with the odes of Pindar. Translations occasionally involved scholars in the dilemmas of censorship. Thus Christopher Smart entirely omitted Odes 4.10 and re-numbered the remaining odes. He also removed the ending of Odes 4.1. Thomas Creechprinted Epodes 8 and 12 in the original Latin but left out their English translations. Philip Francis left out both the English and Latin for those same two epodes, a gap in the numbering the only indication that something was amiss. French editions of Horace were influential in England and these too were regularly bowdlerized.

Most European nations had their own ‘Horaces’: thus for example Friedrich von Hagedorn was called The German Horace and Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski The Polish Horace (the latter was much imitated by English poets such as Henry Vaughan and Abraham Cowley). Pope Urban VIII wrote voluminously in Horatian meters, including an ode on gout.^[118]

19th century on

Horace maintained a central role in the education of English-speaking elites right up until the 1960s.^[119] A pedantic emphasis on the formal aspects of language-learning at the expense of literary appreciation may have made him unpopular in some quarters^[120] yet it also confirmed his influence—a tension in his reception that underlies Byron‘s famous lines from Childe Harold (Canto iv, 77):^[121]

Then farewell, Horace, whom I hated so
Not for thy faults, but mine; it is a curse
To understand, not feel thy lyric flow,
To comprehend, but never love thy verse.

William Wordsworth‘s mature poetry, including the preface to Lyrical Ballads, reveals Horace’s influence in its rejection of false ornament^[122] and he once expressed “a wish / to meet the shade of Horace…”.^{[nb 30]} John Keats echoed the opening of Horace’s Epodes14 in the opening lines of Ode to a Nightingale.^{[nb 31]}

The Roman poet was presented in the nineteenth century as an honorary English gentleman. William Thackeray produced a version of Odes 1.38 in which Horace’s questionable ‘boy’ became ‘Lucy’, and Gerard Manley Hopkins translated the boy innocently as ‘child’. Horace was translated by Sir Theodore Martin (biographer of Prince Albert) but minus some ungentlemanly verses, such as the erotic Odes 1.25 and Epodes 8 and 12. Lord Lytton produced a popular translation and William Gladstone also wrote translations during his last days as Prime Minister.^[123]

Edward FitzGerald‘s Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, though formally derived from the Persian ruba’i, nevertheless shows a strong Horatian influence, since, as one modern scholar has observed,”…the quatrains inevitably recall the stanzas of the ‘Odes’, as does the narrating first person of the world-weary, ageing Epicurean Omar himself, mixing sympotic exhortation and ‘carpe diem’ with splendid moralising and ‘memento mori’ nihilism.“^{[nb 32]} Matthew Arnold advised a friend in verse not to worry about politics, an echo of Odes 2.11, yet later became a critic of Horace’s inadequacies relative to Greek poets, as role models of Victorian virtues, observing: “If human life were complete without faith, without enthusiasm, without energy, Horace…would be the perfect interpreter of human life.“^[124] Christina Rossetti composed a sonnet depicting a woman willing her own death steadily, drawing on Horace’s depiction of ‘Glycera’ in Odes 1.19.5–6and Cleopatra in Odes 1.37.^{[nb 33]} A. E. Housman considered Odes4.7, in Archilochian couplets, the most beautiful poem of antiquity^[125]and yet he generally shared Horace’s penchant for quatrains, being readily adapted to his own elegiac and melancholy strain.^[126] The most famous poem of Ernest Dowson took its title and its heroine’s name from a line of Odes 4.1, Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae, as well as its motif of nostalgia for a former flame. Kiplingwrote a famous parody of the Odes, satirising their stylistic idiosyncrasies and especially the extraordinary syntax, but he also used Horace’s Roman patriotism as a focus for British imperialism, as in the story Regulus in the school collection Stalky & Co., which he based on Odes 3.5.^[127] Wilfred Owen’s famous poem, quoted above, incorporated Horatian text to question patriotism while ignoring the rules of Latin scansion. However, there were few other echoes of Horace in the war period, possibly because war is not actually a major theme of Horace’s work.^[128]

Giacobbe Giusti, Quintus Horatius Flaccus,  Roman lyric poet during the time of Augustus

Bibendum (the symbol of the Michelin tyre company) takes his name from the opening line of Ode 1.37, Nunc est bibendum.

Both W.H.Auden and Louis MacNeice began their careers as teachers of classics and both responded as poets to Horace’s influence. Auden for example evoked the fragile world of the 1930s in terms echoing Odes 2.11.1–4, where Horace advises a friend not to let worries about frontier wars interfere with current pleasures.

And, gentle, do not care to know
Where Poland draws her Eastern bow,
What violence is done;
Nor ask what doubtful act allows
Our freedom in this English house,
Our picnics in the sun.^{[nb 34]}

The American poet, Robert Frost, echoed Horace’s Satires in the conversational and sententious idiom of some of his longer poems, such as The Lesson for Today (1941), and also in his gentle advocacy of life on the farm, as in Hyla Brook (1916), evoking Horace’s fons Bandusiae in Ode 3.13. Now at the start of the third millennium, poets are still absorbing and re-configuring the Horatian influence, sometimes in translation (such as a 2002 English/American edition of the Odes by thirty-six poets)^{[nb 35]} and sometimes as inspiration for their own work (such as a 2003 collection of odes by a New Zealand poet).^{[nb 36]}

Horace’s Epodes have largely been ignored in the modern era, excepting those with political associations of historical significance. The obscene qualities of some of the poems have repulsed even scholars^{[nb 37]} yet more recently a better understanding of the nature of Iambic poetry has led to a re-evaluation of the wholecollection.^[129][130] A re-appraisal of the Epodes also appears in creative adaptations by recent poets (such as a 2004 collection of poems that relocates the ancient context to a 1950s industrial town).^{[nb 38]}

Translations

• John Dryden successfully adapted three of the Odes (and one Epode) into verse for readers of his own age. Samuel Johnsonfavored the versions of Philip Francis. Others favor unrhymed translations.
• In 1964 James Michie published a translation of the Odes—many of them fully rhymed—including a dozen of the poems in the original Sapphic and Alcaic metres.
• More recent verse translations of the Odes include those by David West (free verse), and Colin Sydenham (rhymed).
• Ars Poetica was first translated into English by Ben Jonson and later by Lord Byron.
• Horace’s Odes and the Mystery of Do-Re-Mi Stuart Lyons (rhymed) Aris & Phillips ISBN 978-0-85668-790-7

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Notes

1. ^ Quintilian 10.1.96. The only other lyrical poet Quintilian thought comparable with Horace was the now obscure poet/metrical theorist, Caesius Bassus (R. Tarrant, Ancient Receptions of Horace, 280)
2. ^ Translated from Persius’ own ‘Satires’ 1.116–17: “omne vafer vitium ridenti Flaccus amico / tangit et admissus circum praecordia ludit.”
3. ^ Quoted by N. Rudd from John Dryden’s Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire, excerpted from W.P.Ker’s edition of Dryden’s essays, Oxford 1926, vol. 2, pp. 86–7
4. ^ The year is given in Odes 3.21.1 (“Consule Manlio”), the month in Epistles 1.20.27, the day in Suetonius’ biography Vita (R. Nisbet, Horace: life and chronology, 7)
5. ^ “No son ever set a finer monument to his father than Horace did in the sixth satire of Book I…Horace’s description of his father is warm-hearted but free from sentimentality or exaggeration. We see before us one of the common people, a hard-working, open-minded, and thoroughly honest man of simple habits and strict convictions, representing some of the best qualities that at the end of the Republic could still be found in the unsophisticated society of the Italian municipia“—E. Fraenkel, Horace, 5–6
6. ^ Odes 3.4.28: “nec (me extinxit) Sicula Palinurus unda”; “nor did Palinurus extinguish me with Sicilian waters”. Maecenas’ involvement is recorded by Appian Bell. Civ. 5.99 but Horace’s ode is the only historical reference to his own presence there, depending however on interpretation. (R. Nisbet, Horace: life and chronology, 10)
7. ^ The point is much disputed among scholars and hinges on how the text is interpreted. Epodes 9 for example may offer proof of Horace’s presence if ‘ad hunc frementis’ (‘gnashing at this’ man i.e. the traitrous Roman ) is a misreading of ‘at huc…verterent’ (but hither…they fled) in lines describing the defection of the Galatian cavalry, “ad hunc frementis verterunt bis mille equos / Galli canentes Caesarem” (R. Nisbet, Horace: life and chronology, 12).
8. ^ Suetonius signals that the report is based on rumours by employing the terms “traditur…dicitur” / “it is reported…it is said” (E. Fraenkel, Horace, 21)
9. ^ According to a recent theory, the three books of Odes were issued separately, possibly in 26, 24 and 23 BC (see G. Hutchinson (2002), Classical Quarterly 52: 517–37)
10. ^ 19 BC is the usual estimate but c. 11 BC has good support too (see R. Nisbet, Horace: life and chronology, 18–20
11. ^ The date however is subject to much controversy with 22–18 BC another option (see for example R. Syme, The Augustan Aristocracy, 379–81
12. ^ “[Lucilius]…resembles a man whose only concern is to force / something into the framework of six feet, and who gaily produces / two hundred lines before dinner and another two hundred after.” – Satire1.10.59–61 (translated by Niall Rudd, The Satires of Horace and Persius, Penguin Classics 1973, p 69)
13. ^ There is one reference to Bion by name in Epistles 2.2.60, and the clearest allusion to him is in Satire 1.6, which parallels Bion fragments 1, 2, 16 Kindstrand
14. ^ Epistles 1.17 and 1.18.6–8 are critical of the extreme views of Diogenes and also of social adaptations of Cynic precepts, and yet Epistle 1.2 could be either Cynic or Stoic in its orientation (J. Moles, Philosophy and ethics, p. 177
15. ^ Satires 1.1.25–26, 74–5, 1.2.111–12, 1.3.76–7, 97–114, 1.5.44, 101–3, 1.6.128–31, 2.2.14–20, 25, 2.6.93–7
16. ^ Wilfred Owen, Dulce et decorum est (1917), echoes a line from Carmina 3.2.13, “it is sweet and honourable to die for one’s country”, cited by Stephen Harrison, The nineteenth and twentieth centuries, 340.
17. ^ Propertius published his third book of elegies within a year or two of Horace’s Odes 1–3 and mimicked him, for example, in the opening lines, characterizing himself in terms borrowed from Odes 3.1.13 and 3.30.13–14, as a priest of the Muses and as an adaptor of Greek forms of poetry (R. Tarrant, Ancient receptions of Horace, 227)
18. ^ Ovid for example probably borrowed from Horace’s Epistle 1.20 the image of a poetry book as a slave boy eager to leave home, adapting it to the opening poems of Tristia 1 and 3 (R. Tarrant, Ancient receptions of Horace), and Tristia 2 may be understood as a counterpart to Horace’s Epistles 2.1, both being letters addressed to Augustus on literary themes (A. Barchiesi, Speaking Volumes, 79–103)
19. ^ The comment is in Persius 1.114–18, yet that same satire has been found to have nearly 80 reminiscences of Horace; see D. Hooley, The Knotted Thong, 29
20. ^ The allusion to Venusine comes via Horace’s Sermones 2.1.35, while lamp signifies the lucubrations of a conscientious poet. According to Quintilian (93), however, many people in Flavian Rome preferred Lucilius not only to Horace but to all other Latin poets (R. Tarrant, Ancient receptions of Horace, 279)
21. ^ Prudentius sometimes alludesto the Odes in a negative context, as expressions of a secular life he is abandoning. Thus for example male pertinax, employed in Prudentius’s Praefatio to describe a wilful desire for victory, is lifted from Odes 1.9.24, where it describes a girl’s half-hearted resistance to seduction. Elsewhere he borrows dux bone from Odes 4.5.5 and 37, where it refers to Augustus, and applies it to Christ (R. Tarrant, Ancient receptions of Horace, 282
22. ^ St Jerome, Epistles 22.29, incorporating a quote from 2 ‘Corinthians6.14: qui consensus Christo et Belial? quid facit cum psalterio Horatius?(cited by K. Friis-Jensen, Horace in the Middle Ages, 292)
23. ^ Odes 3.3.1–8 was especially influential in promoting the value of heroic calm in the face of danger, describing a man who could bear even the collapse of the world without fear (si fractus illabatur orbis,/impavidum ferient ruinae). Echoes are found in Seneca’s Agamemnon 593–603, Prudentius’s Peristephanon 4.5–12 and Boethius’s Consolatio 1 metrum 4.(R. Tarrant, Ancient receptions of Horace, 283–85)
24. ^ Heiric, like Prudentius, gave Horatian motifs a Christian context. Thus the character Lydia in Odes 3.19.15, who would willingly die for her lover twice, becomes in Heiric’s Life of St Germaine of Auxerre a saint ready to die twice for the Lord’s commandments (R. Tarrant, Ancient receptions of Horace, 287–88)
25. ^ According to a medieval French commentary on the Satires: “…first he composed his lyrics, and in them, speaking to the young, as it were, he took as subject-matter love affairs and quarrels, banquets and drinking parties. Next he wrote his Epodes, and in them composed invectives against men of a more advanced and more dishonourable age…He next wrote his book about the Ars Poetica, and in that instructed men of his own profession to write well…Later he added his book of Satires, in which he reproved those who had fallen a prey to various kinds of vices. Finally he finished his oeuvre with the Epistles, and in them, following the method of a good farmer, he sowed the virtues where he had rooted out the vices.” (cited by K. Friis-Jensen, Horace in the Middle Ages, 294–302)
26. ^ ‘Horace Juvenal’ was author of Modern manners: a poem, 1793
27. ^ see for example Spectator 312, 27 Feb. 1712; 548, 28 Nov. 1712; 618, 10 Nov. 1714
28. ^ One echo of Horace may be found in line 69: “Were it not better done as others use,/ To sport with Amaryllis in the shade/Or with the tangles of Neaera’s hair?“, which points to the Neara in Odes 3.14.21 (Douglas Bush, Milton: Poetical Works, 144, note 69)
29. ^ Cfr. James Boswell, “The Life of Samuel Johnson” Aetat. 20, 1729 where Boswell remarked of Johnson that Horace’s Odes “were the compositions in which he took most delight.”
30. ^ The quote, from Memorials of a Tour of Italy (1837), contains allusions to Odes 3.4 and 3.13 (S. Harrison, The nineteenth and twentieth centuries, 334–35)
31. ^ “My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains / my sense…” echoes Epodes 14.1–4 (S. Harrison, The nineteenth and twentieth centuries, 335)
32. ^ Comment by S. Harrison, editor and contributor to The Cambridge Companion to Horace (S. Harrison, The nineteenth and twentieth centuries, 337
33. ^ Rossetti’s sonnet, A Study (a soul), dated 1854, was not published in her own lifetime. Some lines: She stands as pale as Parian marble stands / Like Cleopatra when she turns at bay… (C. Rossetti, Complete Poems, 758
34. ^ Quoted from Auden’s poem Out on the lawn I lie in bed, 1933, and cited by S. Harrison, The nineteenth and twentieth centuries, 340
35. ^ Edited by McClatchy, reviewed by S. Harrison, Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2003.03.05
36. ^ I. Wedde, The Commonplace Odes, Auckland 2003, (cited by S. Harrison, The nineteenth and twentieth centuries, 345)
37. ^ ‘Political’ Epodes are 1, 7, 9, 16; notably obscene Epodes are 8 and 12. E. Fraenkel is among the admirers repulsed by these two poems, for another view of which see for example Dee Lesser Clayman, ‘Horace’s Epodes VIII and XII: More than Clever Obscenity?’, The Classical World Vol. 6, No. 1 (September 1975), pp 55–61 JSTOR 4348329
38. ^ M. Almond, The Works 2004, Washington, cited by S. Harrison, The nineteenth and twentieth centuries, 346

Citations

1. ^ Jump up to:^a b J. Michie, The Odes of Horace, 14
2. ^ N. Rudd, The Satires of Horace and Persius, 10
3. ^ R. Barrow R., The Romans Pelican Books, 119
4. ^ Fraenkel, Eduard. Horace. Oxford: 1957, p. 1.
   For the Life of Horace by Suetonius, see: (Vita Horati)
5. ^ Brill’s Companion to Horace, edited by Hans-Christian Günther, Brill, 2012, p.7, Google Book
6. ^ Satires 1.10.30
7. ^ Epistles 2.1.69 ff.
8. ^ E. Fraenkel, Horace, 2–3
9. ^ Satires 2.1.34
10. ^ T. Frank, Catullus and Horace, 133–34
11. ^ A. Campbell, Horace: A New Interpretation, 84
12. ^ Epistles 1.16.49
13. ^ R. Nisbet, Horace: life and chronology, 7
14. ^ E. Fraenkel, Horace, 3–4
15. ^ Jump up to:^a b V. Kiernan, Horace: Poetics and Politics, 24
16. ^ Satires 1.6.86
17. ^ E. Fraenkel, Horace, 4–5
18. ^ Jump up to:^a b Satires 1.6
19. ^ V. Kiernan, Horace: Poetics and Politics, 25
20. ^ Odes 2.7
21. ^ E. Fraenkel, Horace, 8–9
22. ^ E. Fraenkel, Horace, 9–10
23. ^ Satires 1.6.48
24. ^ Jump up to:^a b R. Nisbet, Horace: life and chronology, 8
25. ^ V. Kiernan, Horace, 25
26. ^ Odes 2.7.10
27. ^ Epistles 2.2.51–2
28. ^ V. Kiernan, Horace: Poetics and politics
29. ^ E. Fraenkel, Horace, 14–15
30. ^ Christopher Brown, in A Companion to the Greek Lyric Poets, D.E.Gerber (ed), Leiden 1997, pages 13–88
31. ^ Douglas E. Gerber, Greek Iambic Poetry, Loeb Classical Library (1999), Introduction pages i–iv
32. ^ D. Mankin, Horace: Epodes,C.U.P., 8
33. ^ D. Mankin, Horace: Epodes, 6
34. ^ R. Conway, New Studies of a Great Inheritance, 49–50
35. ^ V. Kiernan, Horace: Poetics and Politics, 18–19
36. ^ F. Muecke, The Satires, 109–10
37. ^ R. Lyne, Augustan Poetry and Society, 599
38. ^ J. Griffin, Horace in the Thirties, 6
39. ^ Jump up to:^a b R. Nisbet, Horace: life and chronology, 10
40. ^ D. Mankin, Horace: Epodes, 5
41. ^ Satires 1.5
42. ^ Odes 3.4.28
43. ^ Epodes 1 and 9
44. ^ E. Fraenkel, Horace, 15
45. ^ Satires 2.7.53
46. ^ R. Nisbet, Horace: life and chronology, 11
47. ^ V. Kiernan, Horace: Poetics and Politics, 61–2
48. ^ R. Nisbet, Horace: life and chronology, 13
49. ^ Epistles 1.19.35–44
50. ^ Epistles 1.1.10
51. ^ V. Kiernan, Horace: Poetics and Politics, 149, 153
52. ^ Epistles 1.7
53. ^ Epistles 1.20.24–5
54. ^ R. Nisbet, Horace: life and chronology, 14–15
55. ^ E. Fraenkel, Horace, 17–18
56. ^ Epistles 2.2
57. ^ R. Ferri, The Epistles, 121
58. ^ Odes 4.4 and 4.14
59. ^ E. Fraenkel, Horace, 23
60. ^ R Nisbet, Horace: life and chronology, 17–21
61. ^ S. Harrison, Style and poetic texture, 262
62. ^ E. Fraenkel, Horace, 124–5
63. ^ Gundolf, Friedrich (1916). Goethe. Berlin, Germany: Bondi.
64. ^ E. Fraenkel, Horace, 106–7
65. ^ E. Fraenkel, Horace, 74
66. ^ E. Fraenkel, Horace, 95–6
67. ^ J. Griffin, Gods and Religion, 182
68. ^ S. Harrison, Lyric and Iambic, 192
69. ^ S. Harrison, Lyric and Iambic, 194–6
70. ^ Jump up to:^a b E. Fraenkel, Horace, 32, 80
71. ^ L. Morgan, Satire, 177–8
72. ^ S. Harrison, Style and poetic texture, 271
73. ^ R. Ferri, The Epistles, p.121-22
74. ^ E. Fraenkel, Horace, p. 309
75. ^ V. Kiernan, Horace: Poetics and Politics, 28
76. ^ J. Moles, Philosophy and ethics, p. 165-69, 177
77. ^ K. J. Reckford, Some studies in Horace’s odes on love
78. ^ J. Moles, Philosophy and ethics, p. 168
79. ^ Santirocco “Unity and Design”, Lowrie “Horace’s Narrative Odes”
80. ^ Ancona, “Time and the Erotic”
81. ^ J. Moles, Philosophy and ethics, p. 171-73
82. ^ Davis “Polyhymnia” and Lowrie “Horace’s Narrative Odes”
83. ^ J. Moles, Philosophy and ethics, p. 179
84. ^ J. Moles, Philosophy and ethics, p. 174-80
85. ^ R. Tarrant, Ancient receptions of Horace, 279
86. ^ V. Kiernan, Horace: Poetics and Politics, 176
87. ^ D. Money, The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, 326, 332
88. ^ R. Lyme, Augustan Poetry and Society, 603
89. ^ Niall Rudd, The Satires of Horace and Persius, 14
90. ^ R. Tarrant, Ancient receptions of Horace, 282–3
91. ^ R. Tarrant, Ancient receptions of Horace, 280
92. ^ R. Tarrant, Ancient receptions of Horace, 278
93. ^ R. Tarrant, Ancient receptions of Horace, 280–81
94. ^ Jump up to:^a b R. Tarrant, Ancient receptions of Horace, 283
95. ^ R. Tarrant, Ancient receptions of Horace, 285–87
96. ^ R. Tarrant, Ancient receptions of Horace, 288–89
97. ^ Stuart Lyons, Horace’s Odes and the Mystery of Do-Re-Mi
98. ^ Tristia, 4.10.49–50
99. ^ B. Bischoff, Living with the satirists, 83–95
100. ^ K. Friis-Jensen,Horace in the Middle Ages, 291
101. ^ K. Friis-Jensen, Horace in the Middle Ages, 293, 304
102. ^ K. Friis-Jensen, Horace in the Middle Ages, 296–8
103. ^ K. Friis-Jensen, Horace in the Middle Ages, 302
104. ^ K. Friis-Jensen, Horace in the Middle Ages, 299
105. ^ Michael McGann, Horace in the Renaissance, 306
106. ^ E. Rivers, Fray Luis de León: The Original Poems
107. ^ M. McGann, Horace in the Renaissance, 306–7, 313–16
108. ^ D. Money, The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, 318, 331, 332
109. ^ D. Money, The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, 322
110. ^ D. Money, The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, 326–7
111. ^ J. Talbot, A Horatian Pun in Paradise Lost, 21–3
112. ^ B. Loveling, Latin and English Poems, 49–52, 79–83
113. ^ D. Money, The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, 329–31
114. ^ E. Tollet, Poems on Several Occasions, 84
115. ^ Translation adapted from D. Money, The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, 329
116. ^ A. Gilbert, Literary Criticism: Plato to Dryden, 124, 669
117. ^ W. Kupersmith, Roman Satirists in Seventeenth Century England, 97–101
118. ^ D. Money, The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, 319–25
119. ^ S. Harrison, The nineteenth and twentieth centuries, 340
120. ^ V. Kiernan, Horace: Poetics and Politics, x
121. ^ S. Harrison, The nineteenth and twentieth centuries, 334
122. ^ D. Money, The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, 323
123. ^ S. Harrison, The nineteenth and twentieth centuries, 335–37
124. ^ M. Arnold, Selected Prose, 74
125. ^ W. Flesch, Companion to British Poetry, 19th Century, 98
126. ^ S. Harrison, The nineteenth and twentieth centuries, 339
127. ^ S. Medcalfe, Kipling’s Horace, 217–39
128. ^ S. Harrison, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, 340
129. ^ D. Mankin, Horace: Epodes, 6–9
130. ^ R. McNeill, Horace, 12

References

• Arnold, Matthew (1970). Selected Prose. Penguin Books. ISBN 978-0-14-043058-5.
• Barrow, R (1949). The Romans. Penguin/Pelican Books.
• Barchiesi, A (2001). Speaking Volumes: Narrative and Intertext in Ovid and Other Latin Poets. Duckworth.
• Bischoff, B (1971). “Living with the satirists”. Classical Influences on European Culture AD 500–1500. Cambridge University Press.
• Bush, Douglas (1966). Milton: Poetical Works. Oxford University Press.
• Campbell, A (1924). Horace: A New Interpretation. London.
• Conway, R (1921). New Studies of a Great Inheritance. London.
• Davis, Gregson (1991). Polyhymnia. The Rhetoric to Horatian Lyric Discourse. University of California.
• Ferri, Rolando (2007). “The Epistles”. The Cambridge Companion to Horace. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-53684-4.
• Flesch, William (2009). The Facts on File Companion to British Poetry, 19th Century. Infobase Publishing. ISBN 978-0-8160-5896-9.
• Frank, Tenney (1928). Catullus and Horace. New York.
• Fraenkel, Eduard (1957). Horace. Oxford University Press.
• Friis-Jensen, Karsten (2007). “Horace in the Middle Ages”. The Cambridge Companion to Horace. Cambridge University Press.
• Griffin, Jasper (1993). “Horace in the Thirties”. Horace 2000. Ann Arbor.
• Griffin, Jasper (2007). “Gods and religion”. The Cambridge Companion to Horace. Cambridge university Press.
• Harrison, Stephen (2005). “Lyric and Iambic”. A Companion to Latin Literature. Blackwell Publishing.
• Harrison, Stephen (2007). “Introduction”. The Cambridge Companion to Horace. Cambridge University Press.
• Harrison, Stephen (2007). “Style and poetic texture”. The Cambridge Companion to Horace. Cambridge University Press.
• Harrison, Stephen (2007). “The nineteenth and twentieth centuries”. The Cambridge Companion to Horace. Cambridge University Press.
• Hooley, D (1997). The Knotted Thong: Structures of Mimesis in Persius. Ann Arbor.
• Hutchinson, G (2002). “The publication and individuality of Horace’s Odes 1–3”. Classical Quarterly 52.
• Kiernan, Victor (1999). Horace: Poetics and Politics. St Martin’s Press.
• Kupersmith, W (1985). Roman Satirists in Seventeenth Century England. Lincoln, Nabraska and London.
• Loveling, Benjamin (1741). Latin and English Poems, by a Gentleman of Trinity College, Oxford. London.
• Lowrie, Michèle (1997). Horace’s Narrative Odes. Oxford University Press.
• Lyne, R (1986). “Augustan Poetry and Society”. The Oxford History of the Classical World. Oxford University Press.
• Mankin, David (1995). Horace: Epodes. Cambridge university Press.
• McNeill, Randall (2010). Horace. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-980511-2.
• Michie, James (1967). “Horace the Man”. The Odes of Horace. Penguin Classics.
• Moles, John (2007). “Philosophy and ethics”. The Cambridge Companion to Horace. Cambridge University Press.
• Money, David (2007). “The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries”. The Cambridge Companion to Horace. Cambridge University Press.
• Morgan, Llewelyn (2005). “Satire”. A Companion to Latin Literature. Blackwell Publishing.
• Muecke, Frances (2007). “the Satires”. The Cambridge Companion to Horace. Cambridge University Press.
• Nisbet, Robin (2007). “Horace: life and chronology”. The Cambridge Companion to Horace. Cambridge University Press.
• Reckford, K. J. (1997). Horatius: the man and the hour. 118. American Journal of Philology. pp. 538–612.
• Rivers, Elias (1983). Fray Luis de León: The Original Poems. Grant and Cutler.
• Rossetti, Christina (2001). The Complete Poems. Penguin Books.
• Rudd, Niall (1973). The Satires of Horace and Persius. Penguin Classics.
• Santirocco, Matthew (1986). Unity and Design in Horace’s Odes. University of North Carolina.
• Syme, R (1986). The Augustan Aristocracy. Oxford University Press.
• Talbot, J (2001). “A Horatian Pun in Paradise Lost”. Notes and Queries 48 (1). Oxford University Press.
• Tarrant, Richard (2007). “Ancient receptions of Horace”. The Cambridge Companion to Horace. Cambridge University Press.
• Tollet, Elizabeth (1755). Poems on Several Occasions. London.

Further reading

• Davis, Gregson (1991). Polyhymnia the Rhetoric of Horatian Lyric Discourse. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-91030-3.
• Fraenkel, Eduard (1957). Horace. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Horace (1983). The Complete Works of Horace. Charles E. Passage, trans. New York: Ungar. ISBN 0-8044-2404-7.
• Johnson, W. R. (1993). Horace and the Dialectic of Freedom: Readings in Epistles 1. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. ISBN 0-8014-2868-8.
• Lyne, R.O.A.M. (1995). Horace: Behind the Public Poetry. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. ISBN 0-300-06322-9.
• Lyons, Stuart (1997). Horace’s Odes and the Mystery of Do-Re-Mi. Aris & Phillips.
• Lyons, Stuart (2010). Music in the Odes of Horace. Aris & Phillips.
• Michie, James (1964). The Odes of Horace. Rupert Hart-Davis.
• Newman, J.K. (1967). Augustus and the New Poetry. Brussels: Latomus, revue d’études latines.
• Noyes, Alfred (1947). Horace: A Portrait. New York: Sheed and Ward.
• Perret, Jacques (1964). Horace. Bertha Humez, trans. New York: New York University Press.
• Putnam, Michael C.J. (1986). Artifices of Eternity: Horace’s Fourth Book of Odes. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ISBN 0-8014-1852-6.
• Reckford, Kenneth J. (1969). Horace. New York: Twayne.
• Rudd, Niall, ed. (1993). Horace 2000: A Celebration – Essays for the Bimillennium. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press. ISBN 0-472-10490-X.
• Sydenham, Colin (2005). Horace: The Odes. Duckworth.
• West, David (1997). Horace The Complete Odes and Epodes. Oxford University Press.
• Wilkinson, L.P. (1951). Horace and His Lyric Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Horaceat Wikipedia’s sister projects

• Definitions from Wiktionary
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• Quotations from Wikiquote
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• Works by Horace at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Horace at Internet Archive
• Works by Horace at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks) 
• Q. Horati Flacci opera, recensuerunt O. Keller et A. Holder, 2 voll., Lipsiae in aedibus B. G. Teubneri, 1864-9.
• Common sayings from Horace
• The works of Horace at The Latin Library
• Carmina Horatiana All Carmina of Horace in Latin recited by Thomas Bervoets.
• Selected Poems of Horace
• Works by Horace at Perseus Digital Library
• Biography and chronology
• Horace’s works: text, concordances and frequency list
• SORGLL: Horace, Odes I.22, read by Robert Sonkowsky
• Translations of several odes in the original meters (with accompaniment).
• A discussion and comparison of three different contemporary translations of Horace’s Odes
• Some spurious lines in the Ars Poetica?
• Horati opera, Acronis et Porphyrionis commentarii, varia lectio etc. (latine)
• Horace MS 1a Ars Poetica and Epistulae at OPenn

hide v t e Works by Horace
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Leonardo da Vinci, Ginevra de’ Benci, c. 1474

 

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Giorgione, Adoration of the Shepherds, c. 1500

 

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El Greco, Saint Martin and the Beggar, c. 1597-1599^[22]

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Giorgione and Titian, Portrait of a Venetian Nobleman, c. 1507

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Rembrandt van Rijn, The Mill, 1648

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Peter Paul Rubens, Germanicus and Agrippina, 1614

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Édouard Manet, The Railway, 1872

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Édouard Manet, The Plum,1878

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Claude Monet, The Artist’s Garden at Vétheuil, 188

 

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Vincent van Gogh, Self-portrait, August 1889

 

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Paul Gauguin, Self-portrait, 1889

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Vincent van Gogh, Woman in White, 1890

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Claude Monet, Rouen Cathedral, West Facade, Sunlight, 1894

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Édouard Manet, The Old Musician, 1862

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Henri Matisse, Open Window, Collioure, 1905

 

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Eugène Delacroix, Columbus and His Son at La Rábida, 1838

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Paul Cézanne, Boy in a Red Waistcoat, 1888–1890

 

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Pablo Picasso, Family of Saltimbanques, 1905

 

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Pablo Picasso, Still Life, 1918

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Henri Rousseau, The Equatorial Jungle, 1909

Giacobbe Giusti, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

 

Giacobbe Giusti, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

 

Giacobbe Giusti, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

 

Giacobbe Giusti, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

 

Giacobbe Giusti, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

 

Giacobbe Giusti, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

 

Giacobbe Giusti, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

 

Giacobbe Giusti, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Location in Washington, D.C. Show map of Washington, D.C.Show map of the USShow all
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Established	1937
Location	National Mall between 3rd and 9th Streets at Constitution Avenue NW, Washington, DC, 20565, National Mall, Washington, D.C.
Coordinates	38.89147°N 77.02001°W
Visitors	5,232,277 (2017) – Ranked seventh globally [1]
Director	Earl A. Powell III
Public transit access	Metro: **   Red Line Judiciary Square**   Yellow Line   Green Line Archives **   Blue Line   Orange Line   Silver Line Smithsonian* Metrobus: 4th Street and 7th Street NW* DC Circulator: 4th Street and Madison Drive; 9th Street and Constitution Avenue NW
Website	www.nga.gov

The National Gallery of Art, and its attached Sculpture Garden, is a national art museum in Washington, D.C., located on the National Mall, between 3rd and 9th Streets, at Constitution AvenueNW. Open to the public and free of charge, the museum was privately established in 1937 for the American people by a joint resolution of the United States Congress. Andrew W. Mellon donated a substantial art collection and funds for construction. The core collection includes major works of art donated by Paul Mellon, Ailsa Mellon Bruce, Lessing J. Rosenwald, Samuel Henry Kress, Rush Harrison Kress, Peter Arrell Browne Widener, Joseph E. Widener, and Chester Dale. The Gallery’s collection of paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculpture, medals, and decorative arts traces the development of Western Art from the Middle Ages to the present, including the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the Americas and the largest mobile created by Alexander Calder.

The Gallery’s campus includes the original neoclassical West Building designed by John Russell Pope, which is linked underground to the modern East Building, designed by I. M. Pei, and the 6.1-acre (25,000 m²) Sculpture Garden. The Gallery often presents temporary special exhibitions spanning the world and the history of art. It is one of the largest museums in North America.

History

National Gallery of Art

Pittsburgh banker (and Treasury Secretary from 1921 until 1932) Andrew W. Mellonbegan gathering a private collection of old masterpaintings and sculptures during World War I. During the late 1920s, Mellon decided to direct his collecting efforts towards the establishment of a new national gallery for the United States.

In 1930, partly for tax reasons, Mellon formed the A. W. Mellon Educational and Charitable Trust, which was to be the legal owner of works intended for the gallery. In 1930–1931, the Trust made its first major acquisition, 21 paintings from the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg as part of the Soviet sale of Hermitage paintings, including such masterpieces as Raphael‘s Alba Madonna, Titian‘s Venus with a Mirror, and Jan van Eyck‘s Annunciation.

In 1929 Mellon had initiated contact with the recently appointed Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, Charles Greeley Abbot. Mellon was appointed in 1931 as a Commissioner of the Institution’s National Gallery of Art. When the director of the Gallery retired, Mellon asked Abbot not to appoint a successor, as he proposed to endow a new building with funds for expansion of the collections.

However, Mellon’s trial for tax evasion, centering on the Trust and the Hermitage paintings, caused the plan to be modified. In 1935, Mellon announced in The Washington Star, his intention to establish a new gallery for old masters, separate from the Smithsonian. When asked by Abbot, he explained that the project was in the hands of the Trust and that its decisions were partly dependent on “the attitude of the Government towards the gift”.

In January 1937, Mellon formally offered to create the new Gallery. On his birthday, 24 March 1937, an Act of Congress accepted the collection and building funds (provided through the Trust), and approved the construction of a museum on the National Mall.

The new gallery was to be effectively self-governing, not controlled by the Smithsonian, but took the old name “National Gallery of Art” while the Smithsonian’s gallery would be renamed the “National Collection of Fine Arts” (now the Smithsonian American Art Museum).^[2][3][4]

Designed by architect John Russell Pope, the new structure was completed and accepted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on behalf of the American people on March 17, 1941. Neither Mellon nor Pope lived to see the museum completed; both died in late August 1937, only two months after excavation had begun. At the time of its inception it was the largest marble structure in the world. The museum stands on the former site of the Baltimore and Potomac Railroadstation, where in 1881 a disgruntled office seeker, Charles Guiteau, shot President James Garfield (see James A. Garfield assassination).^[5]

As anticipated by Mellon, the creation of the National Gallery encouraged the donation of other substantial art collections by a number of private donors. Founding benefactors included such individuals as Paul Mellon, Samuel H. Kress, Rush H. Kress, Ailsa Mellon Bruce, Chester Dale, Joseph Widener, Lessing J. Rosenwaldand Edgar William and Bernice Chrysler Garbisch.

The Gallery’s East Building was constructed in the 1970s on much of the remaining land left over from the original congressional action. Andrew Mellon’s children, Paul Mellon and Ailsa Mellon Bruce, funded the building. Designed by architect I. M. Pei, the contemporary structure was completed in 1978 and was opened on June 1 of that year by President Jimmy Carter. The new building was built to house the Museum’s collection of modern paintings, drawings, sculptures, and prints, as well as study and research centers and offices. The design received a National Honor Award from the American Institute of Architects in 1981.

The final addition to the complex is the National Gallery of Art Sculpture Garden. Completed and opened to the public on May 23, 1999, the location provides an outdoor setting for exhibiting a number of pieces from the Museum’s contemporary sculpture collection.

Operations

National Gallery of Art logo.

The National Gallery of Art is supported through a private-public partnership. The United States federal government provides funds, through annual appropriations, to support the museum’s operations and maintenance. All artwork, as well as special programs, are provided through private donations and funds. The museum is not part of the Smithsonian Institution.

Noted directors of the National Gallery have included David E. Finley, Jr. (1938-1956), John Walker (1956–1968), and J. Carter Brown(1968–1993). Earl A. “Rusty” Powell III (since 1993) is the current director.

Entry to both buildings of the National Gallery of Art is free of charge. From Monday through Saturday, the museum is open from 10 a.m. – 5 p.m.; it is open from 11 – 6 p.m. on Sundays. It is closed on December 25 and January 1.^[6]

Architecture

“East Building” redirects here. It is not to be confused with Eastern Building.

The East Building

Exhibitions in the West Building

Exhibitions in the East Building

Walkway to West Building and Cascade Cafe in National Gallery of Art, Washington.D.C.

The museum comprises two buildings: the West Building (1941) and the East Building (1978) linked by an underground passage. The West Building, composed of pink Tennessee marble, was designed in 1937 by architect John Russell Pope in a neoclassical style (as is Pope’s other notable Washington, D.C. building, the Jefferson Memorial). Designed in the form of an elongated H, the building is centered on a domed rotunda modeled on the interior of the Pantheon in Rome. Extending east and west from the rotunda, a pair of skylit sculpture halls provide its main circulation spine. Bright garden courts provide a counterpoint to the long main axis of the building.

Dome of West Building, an entrance to permanent Renaissance Art collections

The West Building has an extensive collection of paintings and sculptures by European masters from the medieval period through the late 19th century, as well as pre-20th century works by American artists. Highlights of the collection include many paintings by Jan Vermeer, Rembrandt van Rijn, Claude Monet, Vincent van Gogh, and Leonardo da Vinci.

In contrast, the design of the East Building by architect I. M. Pei is geometrical, dividing the trapezoidal shape of the site into two triangles: one isosceles and the other a smaller right triangle. The space defined by the isosceles triangle came to house the museum’s public functions. The portion outlined by the right triangle became the study center. The triangles in turn became the building’s organized motif, echoed and repeated in every dimension.

The building’s central feature is a high atrium designed as an open interior court that is enclosed by a sculptural space spanning 16,000 square feet (1,500 m²). The atrium is centered on the same axis that forms the circulation spine for the West Building and is constructed in the same Tennessee marble.^[7]

However, in 2005 the joints attaching the marble panels to the walls began to show signs of strain, creating a risk that panels might fall onto visitors below. In 2008, NGA officials decided that it had become necessary to remove and reinstall all of the panels. The renovation was completed in 2016.^[8]

The East Building focuses on modern and contemporary art, with a collection including works by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Alexander Calder, a 1977 mural by Robert Motherwell and works by many other artists. The East Building also contains the main offices of the NGA and a large research facility, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA). Among the highlights of the East Building in 2012 was an exhibition of Barnett Newman‘s The Stations of the Cross series of 14 black and white paintings (1958–66).^[9] Newman painted them after he had recovered from a heart attack; they are usually regarded as the peak of his achievement.^{[citation needed]} The series has also been seen as a memorial to the victims of the Holocaust.^[10]

The two buildings are connected by a walkway beneath 4th street, called “the Concourse” on the museum’s map. In 2008, the National Gallery of Art commissioned American artist Leo Villareal to transform the Concourse into an artistic installation. Today, Multiverse is the largest and most complex light sculpture by Villareal featuring approximately 41,000 computer-programmed LED nodes that run through channels along the entire 200-foot (61 m)-long space.^[11] The concourse also includes the food court and a gift shop.

The final element of the National Gallery of Art complex, the Sculpture Garden was completed in 1999 after more than 30 years of planning. To the west of the West Building, on the opposite side of Seventh Street, the 6.1 acres (2.5 ha) Sculpture Garden was designed by landscape architect Laurie Olin^[12] as an outdoor gallery for monumental modern sculpture.

The Sculpture Garden contains plantings of Native American species of canopy and flowering trees, shrubs, ground covers, and perennials. A circular reflecting pool and fountain form the center of its design, which arching pathways of granite and crushed stone complement. (The pool becomes an ice-skating rink during the winter.) The sculptures exhibited in the surrounding landscaped area include pieces by David Smith, Mark Di Suvero, Roy Lichtenstein, Sol LeWitt, Tony Smith, Roxy Paine, Joan Miró, Louise Bourgeois, and Hector Guimard.^[13]

The lobby of National gallery of Art East Building

Taken at the exterior wall of National gallery of Art East Building

Renovations

The NGA’s West Building was renovated from 2007 to 2009. Although some galleries closed for periods of time, others remained open.^[14]

After congressional testimony that the East Building suffered from “systematic structural failures”, NGA adopted a Master Renovations Plan in 1999. This plan established the timeline for closing the building, and planned for the renovation of the electronic security systems, elevators, and HVAC.^[15] Space between the ceilings of existing galleries and the building’s skylights (which was never completed when the building was constructed in 1978)^[15] would be renovated into two, 23-foot (7.0 m) high, hexagonal Tower Galleries. The galleries would have a combined 12,260 square feet (1,139 m²) of space and will be lit by skylights. A rooftop sculpture garden would also be added. NGA officials said that the Tower Galleries would probably house modern art, and the creation of a distinct “Rothko Room” was possible.

Beginning in 2011, NGA undertook an $85 million restoration of the East Building’s façade.^[16] The East Building is clad in 3-inch (7.6 cm) thick pink marble panels. The panels are held about 2 inches (5.1 cm) away from the wall by stainless steel anchors. Gravity holds the panel in the bottom anchors (which are placed at each corner), while “button head” anchors (stainless steel posts with large, flat heads) at the top corners keep the panel upright. Mortar was used on the gravity anchors to level the stones. Joints of flexible colored neoprene were placed between the panels. This system was designed to allow each panel to hang independent of its neighbors, and NGA officials say they are not aware of any other panel system like it.

However, many panels were accidentally mortared together. Seasonal heating and cooling of the façade, infiltration of moisture, and shrinkage of the building’s structural concrete by 2 inches (5.1 cm) over time caused extensive damage to the façade. In 2005, regular maintenance showed that some panels were cracked or significantly damaged, while others leaned by more than 1 inch (2.5 cm) out from the building (threatening to fall).

The NGA hired the structural engineering firm Robert Silman Associates to determine the cause of the problem.^[17] Although the Gallery began raising private funds to fix the issue,^[17] eventually federal funding was used to repair the building.^[16] In 2012, the NGA chose a joint venture, Balfour Beatty/Smoot, to complete the repairs. Anodized aluminum anchors replaced the stainless steel ones, and the top corner anchors were moved to the center of the top edge of each stone. The neoprene joints were removed and new colored siliconegaskets installed, and leveling screws rather than mortar used to keep the panels square. Work began in November 2011,^[17] and originally was scheduled to end in 2014.^[16] By February 2012, however, the contractor said work on the façade would end in late 2013, and site restoration would take place in 2014.^[17] The East Building remained open throughout the project.^[14]

In March 2013, the National Gallery of Art announced a $68.4 million renovation to the East Building. This included $38.4 million to refurbish the interior mechanical plant of the structure,^[15] and $30 million to create new exhibition space.^[14] Because the angular interior space of the East Building made it impossible to close off galleries,^[15] the renovation required all but the atrium and offices to close by December 2013. The structure remained closed for three years. The architectural firm of Hartman-Cox oversaw both aspects of the renovation.^[15]

A group of benefactors — which included Victoria and Roger Sant, Mitchell and Emily Rales, and David Rubenstein — privately financed the renovation. The Washington Post reported that the donation was one of the largest the NGA had received in a decade.^[14] NGA staff said that they would use the closure to conserve artwork, plan purchases, and develop exhibitions. Plans for renovating conservation, construction, exhibition prep, groundskeeping, office, storage, and other internal facilities were also ready, but would not be implemented for many years.^[15][18]

Buildings

Giacobbe Giusti, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

• 

  The West Building soon after construction, looking northwest from the National Mall

• 

  North face of the West Building, with the west side of the East Building and the United States Capitol in background

• 

  South face of the West Building (2014)

• 

  Rotunda of the West Building beneath dome (2004)

• 

  Oculus of the West Building dome (2008)

• 

  West Building sculpture gallery (2007)

   

Giacobbe Giusti, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

• 

  West Building garden court (2010)

• 

  Satellite image of National Gallery of Art grounds and surrounding streets (2002)

• 

  Moving walkway and light sculpture in concourse beneath 4th Street connecting East and West Buildings (2016)

• 

  Center of West Building plaza, looking west towards West Building (2010)

• 

  Fountain in West Building plaza (2010)

• 

  View of fountain from concourse beneath West Building plaza (2013)

• 

  Center of West Building plaza, looking east towards entrance of East Building (2000)

• 

  South face of East Building, looking northwest from southeast corner (2010)

• 

  Southwest corner of East Building, looking east (2007)

• 

  Southwest corner of East Building during renovation, looking northeast (2014)

• 

  East Building atrium (2007)

• 

  East Building atrium (2007)

Collection

 List of painters in the National Gallery of Art and National Gallery of Art Sculpture Garden

Gerard van Honthorst‘s monumental masterwork, The Concert, was acquired by the NGA in 2013 and went on display for the first time in 218 years.

The NGA’s collection galleries and Sculpture Garden display European and American paintings, sculpture, works on paper, photographs, and decorative arts. The permanent collection of paintings extends from the Middle Ages to the present day. The Italian Renaissance collection includes two panels from Duccio‘s Maesta, the tondo of the Adoration of the Magi by Fra Angelico and Filippo Lippi, a Botticelli work on the same subject, Giorgione‘s Allendale Nativity, Giovanni Bellini‘s The Feast of the Gods, Ginevra de’ Benci (the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the Americas) and groups of works by Titian and Raphael.

Other European collections include examples of the work of many of the masters of western painting, including a version of Saint Martin and the Beggar, by El Greco, and works by Matthias Grünewald, Cranach the Elder, Rogier van der Weyden, Albrecht Dürer, Frans Hals, Rembrandt, Johannes Vermeer, Francisco Goya, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, and Eugène Delacroix, among others. The collection of sculpture and decorative arts includes such works as the Chalice of Abbot Suger of St-Denis and a collection of work by Auguste Rodin and Edgar Degas. Other highlights of the permanent collection include the second of the two original sets of Thomas Cole‘s series of paintings titled The Voyage of Life, (the first set is at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute in Utica, New York) and the original version of Watson and the Shark by John Singleton Copley(two other versions are in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Detroit Institute of Arts).

The National Gallery’s print collection comprises 75,000 prints, in addition to rare illustrated books. It includes collections of works by Albrecht Dürer, Rembrandt, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, William Blake, Mary Cassatt, Edvard Munch, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg. The collection began with 400 prints donated by five collectors in 1941. In 1942, Joseph E. Widener donated his entire collection of nearly 2,000 works. In 1943, Lessing Rosenwald donated his collection of 8,000 old master and modern prints; between 1943 and 1979, he donated almost 14,000 more works. In 2008, Dave and Reba White Williams donated their collection of more than 5,200 American prints.^[19]

In 2013, the NGA purchased from a private French collection Gerard van Honthorst‘s 1623 painting, The Concert, which had not been publicly viewed since 1795. After initially displaying the 1.23-by-2.06-metre (4.0 by 6.8 ft) The Concert in a special installation in the West Building, the NGA moved the painting to a permanent display in the museum’s Dutch and Flemish galleries.^[20] Although the NGA did not reveal the amount that it had paid for The Concert, art experts estimated the sale price at $20 million.^[21]

Highlights of the collection

Leonardo da Vinci, Ginevra de’ Benci, c. 1474

El Greco, Saint Martin and the Beggar, c. 1597-1599^[22]

Peter Paul Rubens, Germanicus and Agrippina, 1614

Jacques-Louis David, Napoleon in His Study, 1812

Édouard Manet, The Railway, 1872

• 

  Rogier van der Weyden, Portrait of a Lady, c. 1460

• 

  Giorgione, Adoration of the Shepherds, c. 1500

• 

  Raphael, Cowper Madonna, 1504–5

• 

  Giorgione and Titian, Portrait of a Venetian Nobleman, c. 1507

• 

  Giovanni Bellini and Titian, The Feast of the Gods, c. 1514

• 

  El Greco, Laocoön, 1604–16

• 

  Nicolas Poussin, The Assumption of the Virgin, c. 1626

• 

  Rembrandt van Rijn, The Mill, 1648

• 

  Rembrandt van Rijn, Self Portrait with Beret and Turned-Up Collar, 1659

• 

  Johannes Vermeer, A Lady Writing a Letter, 1665-1666

• 

  Jean-Honoré Fragonard, A Young Girl Reading, c. 1776

• 

  Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Marcotte d’Argenteuil, 1810

• 

  Eugène Delacroix, Columbus and His Son at La Rábida, 1838

• 

  Édouard Manet, The Old Musician, 1862

• 

  Édouard Manet, The Plum,1878

• 

  Claude Monet, The Artist’s Garden at Vétheuil, 1880

• 

  Vincent van Gogh, Self-portrait, August 1889

• 

  Paul Gauguin, Self-portrait,1889

• 

  Paul Cézanne, Boy in a Red Waistcoat, 1888–1890

• 

  Vincent van Gogh, Woman in White, 1890

• 

  Claude Monet, Rouen Cathedral, West Facade, Sunlight, 1894

• 

  Henri Matisse, Open Window, Collioure, 1905

• 

  Pablo Picasso, Family of Saltimbanques, 1905

• 

  Henri Rousseau, The Equatorial Jungle, 1909

• 

  Francis Picabia, The Procession, Seville, 1912

• 

  Albert Gleizes, Les Joueurs de football (Football Players), 1912–13

• 

  Pablo Picasso, Still Life, 1918

Selected highlights from the American collection

Benjamin West, Portrait of Colonel Guy Johnson, 1775

James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl, 1862

George Bellows, New York, 1911

• 

  John Singleton Copley, Watson and the Shark,(original version), 1778

• 

  Gilbert Stuart, The Skater, 1782

• 

  Edward Savage, The Washington Family 1789-96

• 

  Edward Hicks, Peaceable Kingdom, c. 1834

• 

  Thomas Cole, The Voyage of Life: Childhood

• 

  Thomas Cole, The Voyage of Life: Youth

• 

  Thomas Cole, The Voyage of Life: Manhood

• 

  Thomas Cole, The Voyage of Life: Old Age

• 

  Thomas Cole, A View of the Mountain Pass Called the Notch of the White Mountains (Crawford Notch), 1839

• 

  George Inness, The Lackawanna Valley, 1855

• 

  Thomas Eakins, The Biglin Brothers Racing, 1873

• 

  Winslow Homer, Breezing Up (A Fair Wind), 1873–76

• 

  Frederic Edwin Church, Morning in The Tropics, (1877)

• 

  Mary Cassatt, The Loge,1882

• 

  John Singer Sargent, Street in Venice, 1889

• 

  Albert Pinkham Ryder, Siegfried and the Rhine Maidens, 1888-1891

• 

  William Merritt Chase, A Friendly Call, 1895

• 

  Robert Henri, Snow in New York, 1902

• 

  George Bellows, Both Members of This Club 1909

• 

  Childe Hassam, Allies Day, May 1917, 1917

• List of most visited art museums
• Collections of the National Gallery of Art
• Micro Gallery, installed in 1995.
• Head of a Catalan Peasant and The Farm, both made by Joan Miró and preserved at the NGA.
• The Voyage of Life by Thomas Cole

Notes

1. Jump up^ The Art Newspaper Review, April 2018
2. Jump up^ Fink, Lois Marie “A History of the Smithsonian American Art Museum”, University of Massachusetts Press (2007) ISBN 978-1-55849-616-3, chapter 3
3. Jump up^ National Gallery of Art website: general introduction ArchivedDecember 8, 2006, at the Wayback Machine.
4. Jump up^ National Gallery of Art website: chronology Archived April 7, 2010, at the Wayback Machine.
5. Jump up^ “National Gallery of Art, West Building”. American Architecture. Archived from the original on 6 October 2011. Retrieved 2 October2011.
6. Jump up^ “National Gallery of Art”. Maps and Hours. 2016-01-12. Archivedfrom the original on 2016-01-03.
7. Jump up^ NGA.gov Archived October 3, 2009, at the Wayback Machine.
8. Jump up^ Leigh, Catesby (December 8, 2009). “An Ultramodern Building Shows Signs of Age”. The Wall Street Journal. Archived from the original on March 11, 2016.
9. Jump up^ “In The Tower: Barnett Newman”. http://www.nga.gov. Archived from the original on 1 February 2015. Retrieved 22 September 2014.
10. Jump up^ Menachem Wecker (August 1, 2012). “His Cross To Bear. Barnett Newman Dealt With Suffering in ‘Zips‘“. The Jewish Daily Forward. Archived from the original on February 4, 2013. Retrieved August 8,2012.
11. Jump up^ “Leo Villareal: Multiverse”. http://www.nga.gov. Archived from the original on 7 October 2014. Retrieved 22 September 2014.
12. Jump up^ “About the Gallery”. http://www.nga.gov. Archived from the original on 22 September 2014. Retrieved 22 September 2014.
13. Jump up^ “Visit: Sculpture Garden”. http://www.nga.gov. Archived from the original on 26 September 2014. Retrieved 22 September 2014.
14. ^ Jump up to:^a b c d Boyle, Katherine and Parker, Lonnae O’Neal. “National Gallery of Art Announces $30 Million Renovation to East Building.” Washington Post. March 12, 2013. Archived April 21, 2016, at the Wayback Machine. Accessed 2013-03-13.
15. ^ Jump up to:^{a b c d e f} Boyle, Katherine. “National Gallery Sees Long-Term Benefit in Long Closing of East Building.” Washington Post. March 13, 2013.Archived January 6, 2018, at the Wayback Machine. Accessed 2013-03-22.
16. ^ Jump up to:^a b c Kelly, John. “Why National Gallery’s East Building Shed Its Pink Marble Skin.” Washington Post. February 21, 2012. ArchivedJanuary 6, 2018, at the Wayback Machine. Accessed 2013-03-13.
17. ^ Jump up to:^a b c d Dietsch, Deborah K. “National Gallery of Art’s Famed East Building Gets a Facelift.” Washington Business Journal. February 3, 2012. Archived October 18, 2015, at the Wayback Machine. Accessed 2013-03-13.
18. Jump up^ “The CIVITAS Chronicles”. traditional-building.com. Archivedfrom the original on 2015-03-23.
19. Jump up^ “Prints”. Nga.gov. 2013-06-19. Archived from the original on 2013-12-21. Retrieved 2013-12-22.
20. Jump up^ Boyle, Katherine. “National Gallery Acquires ‘The Concert’ by Dutch Golden Age Painter Honthorst.” Washington Post. November 22, 2013. Archived August 29, 2017, at the Wayback Machine. Accessed 2013-11-22.
21. Jump up^ Vogel, Carol. “National Gallery Acquires a van Honthorst Masterwork.” New York Times. November 21, 2013. ArchivedFebruary 24, 2017, at the Wayback Machine. Accessed 2013-11-22.
22. Jump up^ “Provenance”. Nga.gov. Archived from the original on 2009-05-07. Retrieved 2013-12-22.

Further reading

• David Cannadine, Mellon: An American Life, Knopf, 2006, ISBN 0-679-45032-7
• Neil Harris, Capital Culture: J. Carter Brown, the National Gallery of Art, and the Reinvention of the Museum Experience, University of Chicago Press, 2013, ISBN 9780226067704
• Andrew Kelly, Kentucky by Design: The Decorative Arts, American Culture, and the Index of American Design, University Press of Kentucky, 2015. ISBN 978-0-8131-5567-8
• “The National Gallery of Art, Washington”, special number of Connaissance des Arts, Société Français de Promotion Artistique (2000) ISSN 1242-9198

National Gallery of Art.

• Official website 
• Online Gallery of Artwork in the NGA
• Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Gallery_of_Art

http://www.giacobbegiusti.com

Giacobbe Giusti, Arch of Constantine, Rome

Giacobbe Giusti, Arch of Constantine, Rome

The main inscription on the attic would originally have been of bronze letters. It can still be read easily; only the recesses in which the letters sat, and their attachment holes, remain. It reads thus, identically on both sides (with abbreviations completed in parentheses):

imp(eratori) · caes(ari) · fl(avio) · constantino · maximo · p(io) · f(elici) · avgusto · s(enatus) · p(opulus) · q(ue) · r(omanus) · qvod · instinctv · divinitatis · mentis · magnitvdine · cvm · exercitv · svo · tam · de · tyranno · qvam · de · omni · eivs · factione · vno · tempore · ivstis · rempvblicam · vltvs · est · armis · arcvm · trivmphis · insignem · dicavit

To the Emperor Caesar Flavius Constantinus, the greatest, pious, and blessed Augustus: because he, inspired by the divine, and by the greatness of his mind, has delivered the state from the tyrant and all of his followers at the same time, with his army and just force of arms, the Senate and People of Rome have dedicated this arch, decorated with triumphs.^[7]

 

Giacobbe Giusti, Arch of Constantine, Rome

 

Giacobbe Giusti, Arch of Constantine, Rome

Detail of relief panel, south side, right panel of left arch

Giacobbe Giusti, Arch of Constantine, Rome

Detail of north plinth on second column from east (see gallery), viewed from east, with Victoria (left), prisoners (right)

Giacobbe Giusti, Arch of Constantine, Rome

Round relief, south side, far left. Departure for the hunt

Giacobbe Giusti, Arch of Constantine, Rome

Obsidio (detail)

Giacobbe Giusti, Arch of Constantine, Rome

The last scene (North side of arch) in the Constantinian frieze on the Arch of Constantine. It recalls Marcus Aurelius in the liberalitas attic panel of the arch, overseeing the distribution of gifts to the public. Constantine is in the exact center of the frieze (in the center of this photo), seated on a podium (his head is missing). The similarity to Christian depictions of the throned Christ surrounded by disciples – intentional or coincidental – is obvious. Constantine’s right hand holds a tessera with slots for coins, some of which are falling out to be caught in the toga of a senator who gazes up at his benevolent leader

Giacobbe Giusti, Arch of Constantine, Rome

Rome, Arch of Constantine, main entablature NW corner.

Giacobbe Giusti, Arch of Constantine, Rome

Rilievi circolari dell’epoca dell’imperatore Adriano e fregio contemporaneo all’arco

Giacobbe Giusti, Arch of Constantine, Rome

Capo barbaro supplicante, che abbraccia il figlio (dettaglio dal pannello della Clementia)

Giacobbe Giusti, Arch of Constantine, Rome

Ritratto di Tiberio Claudio Pompeiano (al centro)

Giacobbe Giusti, Arch of Constantine, Rome

Seconda parte: I prigionieri sono incalzati da una carica della cavalleria guidata dall’imperatore stesso e seguito da signiferi e cornicini

Giacobbe Giusti, Arch of Constantine, Rome

Panneau sculpté de l’époque de Marc Aurèle

 

Giacobbe Giusti, Arch of Constantine, Rome

Plinths, north side looking east

Giacobbe Giusti, Arch of Constantine, Rome

 

Giacobbe Giusti, Arch of Constantine, Rome

 

Giacobbe Giusti, Arch of Constantine, Rome

 

Giacobbe Giusti, Arch of Constantine, Rome

 

Giacobbe Giusti, Arch of Constantine, Rome

Es scheint deutlich erkennbar, dass die Attikanachträglich aufgesetzt wurde

.

Arch of Constantine Giacobbe Giusti, Arch of Constantine, Rome
Arch of Constantine
Location	Forum
Built in	AD 315
Built by/for	Constantine I
Type of structure	Triumphal arch
Related	List of ancient monuments in Rome
Arch of Constantine

Giacobbe Giusti, Arch of Constantine, Rome

The Arch of Constantine, Rome – painted by Herman van Swanevelt, 17th century

Giacobbe Giusti, Arch of Constantine, Rome

South side, from Via triumphalis. Colosseum to right

Giacobbe Giusti, Arch of Constantine, Rome

North side, from the Colosseum

Giacobbe Giusti, Arch of Constantine, Rome

West side

Giacobbe Giusti, Arch of Constantine, Rome

East side, Forum behind

Relief panels, round reliefs and frieze over left (west) arch, from south

Round reliefs and frieze over right (east) arch, from south

Giacobbe Giusti, Arch of Constantine, Rome

Arch of Constantino 2013

The Arch of Constantine (Italian: Arco di Costantino) is a triumphal arch in Rome, situated between the Colosseum and the Palatine Hill. It was erected by the Roman Senate to commemorate Constantine I‘s victory over Maxentius at the Battle of Milvian Bridge in 312.^[a]Dedicated in 315, it is the largest Roman triumphal arch.^[1] The arch spans the Via triumphalis, the way taken by the emperors when they entered the city in triumph.

Though dedicated to Constantine, much of the decorative material incorporated earlier work from the time of the emperors Trajan (98–117), Hadrian (117–138) and Marcus Aurelius (161–180), and is thus a collage.^[2] The last of the existing triumphal arches in Rome, it is also the only one to make extensive use of spolia,^[3] reusing several major reliefs from 2nd century imperial monuments, which give a striking and famous stylistic contrast to the sculpture newly created for the arch. This earned it the derisive nickname of Cornacchia di EsopoAesop’s Crow.^[4]

The arch is 21 m high, 25.9 m wide and 7.4 m deep. It has three archways, the central one being 11.5 m high and 6.5 m wide and the lateral archways 7.4 m by 3.4 m each. Above the archways is placed the attic, composed of brickwork reveted (faced) with marble. A staircase within the arch is entered from a door at some height from the ground, on the west side, facing the Palatine Hill. The general design with a main part structured by detached columns and an attic with the main inscription above is modelled after the example of the Arch of Septimius Severus on the Roman Forum.

History

The arch, which was constructed between 312 and 315 AD, was dedicated by the Senate to commemorate ten years (decennalia^[b]) of Constantine’s reign (306–337) and his victory over the then reigning emperor Maxentius (306–312) at the Battle of Milvian Bridge on 28 October 312,^[6] as described on its attic inscription,^[7] and officially opened on 25 July 315. Not only did the Roman senate give the arch for Constantine’s victory, they also were celebrating decennia, a series of games that happens every decade for the Romans. On this occasion they also said many prayers.^[8] However, Constantine had actually entered Rome on 29 October 312, amidst great rejoicing, and the Senate then commissioned the monument.^[9]Constantine then left Rome within two months and did not return till 326.^[10]

The location, between the Palatine Hill and the Caelian Hill, spanned the ancient route of Roman triumphs (Via triumphalis) at its origin, where it diverged from the Via sacra.^[6][4][11] This route was that taken by the emperors when they entered the city in triumph. This route started at the Campus Martius, led through the Circus Maximus, and around the Palatine Hill; immediately after the Arch of Constantine, the procession would turn left at the Meta Sudans and march along the Via sacra to the Forum Romanum and on to the Capitoline Hill, passing through both the Arches of Titus and Septimius Severus.

During the Middle Ages, the Arch of Constantine was incorporated into one of the family strongholds of ancient Rome, as shown in the painting by Herman van Swanevelt, here. Works of restoration were first carried out in the 18th century,^[3][c] the last excavations have taken place in the late 1990s, just before the Great Jubilee of 2000. The arch served as the finish line for the marathon athletic event for the 1960 Summer Olympics.

Dates of incorporated decorative material

Controversy

There has been much controversy over the origins of the arch, with some scholars claiming that it should no longer be referred to as Constantine’s arch, but is in fact an earlier work from the time of Hadrian, reworked during Constantine’s reign,^[6] or at least the lower part.^[d] Another theory holds that it was erected, or at least started, by Maxentius,^[8][e] and one scholar believed it was as early as the time of Domitian (81–96).^[16][6]

Symbolism

Whatever the faults of Maxentius, his reputation in Rome was influenced by his contributions to public building. By the time of his accession in 306 Rome was becoming increasingly irrelevant to the governance of the empire, most emperors choosing to live elsewhere and focusing on defending the fragile boundaries, where they frequently founded new cities. This factor contributed to his ability to seize power. By contrast Maxentius concentrated on restoring the capital, his epithet being conservator urbis suae (preserver of his city). Thus Constantine was perceived amongst other things as the deposer of one of the city’s greatest benefactors, and needed to acquire legitimacy. Much controversy has surrounded the patronage of the public works of this period. The German philosopher, Walter Benjamin observed that history is seen through the eyes of the victor (Über den Begriff der GeschichteVII, 1940), and Constantine and his biographers were no exception. Issuing a damnatio memoriae he set out to systematically erase the memory of Maxentius. Consequently, there remains considerable uncertainty regarding the patronage of early fourth century public buildings, including the Arch of Constantine, which may originally have been an Arch of Maxentius.^[11]

Sculptural style

Constantine’s Arch is an important example, frequently cited in surveys of art history, of the stylistic changes of the 4th century, and the “collapse of the classical Greek canon of forms during the late Roman period”,^[2] a sign the city was in decline, and would soon be eclipsed by Constantine’s founding of a new capital at Constantinople in 324.^[7] The contrast between the styles of the re-used Imperial reliefs of Trajan, Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius and those newly made for the arch is dramatic and, according to Ernst Kitzinger, “violent”,^[2] although it should be noted that where the head of an earlier emperor was replaced by that of Constantine the artist was still able to achieve a “soft, delicate rendering of the face of Constantine” that was “a far cry from the dominant style of the workshop”.^[17] It remains the most impressive surviving civic monument from Rome in Late Antiquity, but is also one of the most controversial with regards to its origins and meanings.^[6]

Kitzinger compares a roundel of Hadrian lion-hunting, which is “still rooted firmly in the tradition of late Hellenistic art“, and there is “an illusion of open, airy space in which figures move freely and with relaxed self-assurance” with the later frieze where the figures are “pressed, trapped, as it were, between two imaginary planes and so tightly packed within the frame as to lack all freedom of movement in any direction”, with “gestures that are “jerky, overemphatic and uncoordinated with the rest of the body”.^[2] In the 4th century reliefs, the figures are disposed geometrically in a pattern that “makes sense only in relation to the spectator”, in the largesse scene (below) centred on the emperor who looks directly out to the viewer. Kitzinger continues: “Gone too is the classical canon of proportions. Heads are disproportionately large, trunks square, legs stubby … “Differences in the physical size of figures drastically underline differences of rank and importance which the second-century artist had indicated by subtle compositional means within a seemingly casual grouping. Gone, finally are elaboration of detail and differentiation of surface texture. Faces are cut rather than modelled, hair takes the form of a cap with some superficial stippling, drapery folds are summarily indicated by deeply drilled lines.”^[18]

The commission was clearly highly important, if hurried, and the work must be considered as reflecting the best available craftsmanship in Rome at the time; the same workshop was probably responsible for a number of surviving sarcophagi.^[18] The question of how to account for what may seem a decline in both style and execution has generated a vast amount of discussion. Factors introduced into the discussion include: a breakdown of the transmission in artistic skills due to the political and economic disruption of the Crisis of the Third Century,^[19]influence from Eastern and other pre-classical regional styles from around the Empire (a view promoted by Josef Strzygowski (1862-1941), and now mostly discounted),^[20]the emergence into high-status public art of a simpler “popular” or “Italic” style that had been used by the less wealthy throughout the reign of Greek models, an active ideological turning against what classical styles had come to represent, and a deliberate preference for seeing the world simply and exploiting the expressive possibilities that a simpler style gave.^[21] The sculptors of Constantine’s time were more interested in symbolism: both symbolism for religion as well as symbolism for history.^[22] One factor that cannot be responsible, as the date and origin of the Venice Portrait of the Four Tetrarchs show, is the rise of Christianity to official support, as the changes predated that.^[23]

The stylistic references to the earlier arches of Titus and Septimius Severus, together with the incorporation of spolia from the times of other earlier emperors may be considered a deliberate tribute to Roman history.^[24]

Iconography

The arch is heavily decorated with parts of older monuments, which assume a new meaning in the context of the Constantinian building. As it celebrates the victory of Constantine, the new “historic” friezes illustrating his campaign in Italy convey the central meaning: the praise of the emperor, both in battle and in his civilian duties. The other imagery supports this purpose: decoration taken from the “golden times” of the Empire under the 2nd century emperors whose reliefs were re-used places Constantine next to these “good emperors”, and the content of the pieces evokes images of the victorious and pious ruler.

Another explanation given for the re-use is the short time between the start of construction (late 312 at the earliest) and the dedication (summer 315), so the architects used existing artwork to make up for the lack of time to create new art. It could be that so many old parts were used because the builders themselves did not feel the artists of their time could do better than what had already been done by different people.^[22] As yet another possible reason, it has often been suggested that the Romans of the 4th century truly did lack the artistic skill to produce acceptable artwork, and were aware of it, and therefore plundered the ancient buildings to adorn their contemporary monuments. This interpretation has become less prominent in more recent times, as the art of Late Antiquity has been appreciated in its own right. It is possible that a combination of those explanations is correct.^[25]

Attic

Giacobbe Giusti, Arch of Constantine, Rome

South attic

On the top of each column, large sculptures representing Dacians can be seen, which date from Trajan. Above the central archway is the inscription, forming the most prominent portion of the attic and is identical on both sides of the arch. Flanking the inscription on both sides are four pairs of relief panels above the minor archways, eight in total. These were taken from an unknown monument erected in honour of Marcus Aurelius. On the north side, from left to right, the panels depict the emperor’s return to Rome after the campaign (adventus), the emperor leaving the city and saluted by a personification of the Via Flaminia, the emperor distributing money among the people (largitio), and the emperor interrogating a German prisoner. On the south side, from left to right, are depicted a captured enemy chieftain led before the emperor, a similar scene with other prisoners (illustrated below), the emperor speaking to the troops (adlocutio), and the emperor sacrificing a pig, sheep and bull (suovetaurilia). Together with three panels now in the Capitoline Museum, the reliefs were probably taken from a triumphal monument commemorating Marcus Aurelius’ war against the Marcomanni and the Sarmatians from 169 – 175, which ended with Marcus Aurelius’ triumphant return in 176. On the largitio panel, the figure of Marcus Aurelius’ son Commodus has been eradicated following the latter’s damnatio memoriae.

From the same time period the two large (3 m high) panels decorating the attic on the east and west sides of the arch show scenes from Trajan‘s Dacian Wars. Together with the two reliefs on the inside of the central archway, these came from a large frieze celebrating the Dacian victory. The original place of this frieze was either the Forum of Trajan, or the barracks of the emperor’s horse guard on the Caelius.

Giacobbe Giusti, Arch of Constantine, Rome

Detail of relief panel, south side, right panel of left arch

Main section

Giacobbe Giusti, Arch of Constantine, Rome

 

Detail of north plinth on second column from east (see gallery), viewed from east, with Victoria (left), prisoners (right)

Giacobbe Giusti, Arch of Constantine, Rome

Round relief, south side, far left. Departure for the hunt

The general layout of the main facade is identical on both sides of the arch, consisting of four columns on bases, dividing the structure into a central arch and two lateral arches, the latter being surmounted by two round reliefs over a horizontal frieze. The four columns are of Corinthian order made of Numidian yellow marble (giallo antico), one of which has been transferred into the Basilica di San Giovanni in Laterano and was replaced by a white marble column. The columns stand on bases (plinthsor socles), decorated on three sides. The reliefs on the front show Victoria, either inscribing a shield or holding palm branches, while those to the side show captured barbarians alone or with Roman soldiers. Though Constantinian, they are modelled on those of the Arch of Septimius Severus (and the destroyed Arcus novus^[f]), and may be considered as a “standard” item.^[26]

Giacobbe Giusti, Arch of Constantine, Rome

Round reliefs above right lateral archway, from south, over friezes

Plinths of columns on north side, looking west (see detail to right)

Detail of western plinths (see detail of left plinth in side bar)

Plinths, north side looking east

The pairs of round reliefs above each lateral archway date to the times of Emperor Hadrian. They display scenes of hunting and sacrificing: (north side, left to right) hunt of a boar, sacrifice to Apollo, hunt of a lion, sacrifice to Hercules. On the south side, the left pair show the departure for the hunt (see below) and sacrifice to Silvanus, while those on the right (illustrated on the right) show the hunt of a bear and sacrifice to Diana. The head of the emperor (originally Hadrian) has been reworked in all medallions: on the north side, into Constantine in the hunting scenes and into Licinius or Constantius I in the sacrifice scenes; on the south side, vice versa. The reliefs, c. 2 m in diameter, were framed in porphyry; this framing is only extant on the right side of the northern facade. Similar medallions, of Constantinian origin, are located on the small sides of the arch; the eastern side shows the Sun rising, on the western side, the Moon. Both are on chariots.

The spandrels of the main archway are decorated with reliefs depicting victory figures with trophies (illustrated below), those of the smaller archways show river gods. Column bases and spandrel reliefs are from the time of Constantine.

Spandrel over main arch

Constantinian frieze

Obsidio (detail)

Liberalitas (detail)

The horizontal frieze below the round reliefs are the main parts from the time of Constantine,^[7] running around the monument, one strip above each lateral archway and including the west and east sides of the arch. These “historical” reliefs depict scenes from the Italian campaign of Constantine against Maxentius which was the reason for the construction of the monument. The frieze starts at the western side with the Departure from Milan(Profectio). It continues on the southern, face, with the Siege of Verona (Obsidio) on the left (South west), an event which was of great importance to the war in Northern Italy. On the right (South east) is depicted the Battle of Milvian Bridge (Proelium) with Constantine’s army victorious and the enemy drowning in the river Tiber.^[7] On the eastern side, Constantine and his army enter Rome (Ingressus); the artist seems to have avoided using imagery of the triumph, as Constantine probably did not want to be shown triumphant over the Eternal City. On the northern face, looking towards the city, are two strips with the emperor’s actions after taking possession of Rome. On the left (North east) is Constantine speaking to the citizens on the Forum Romanum (Oratio), while to the right (North west) is the final panel with Constantine distributing money to the people (Liberalitas).^[27][28]

West: Profectio

South west: Obsidio

South east: Proelium

East: Ingressus

North east: Oratio

North west: Liberalitas

Inner sides of the archways

In the central archway, there is one large panel of Trajan’s Dacian War on each wall. Inside the lateral archways are eight portraits busts (two on each wall), destroyed to such an extent that it is no longer possible to identify them.

Inscriptions

The main inscription on the attic would originally have been of bronze letters. It can still be read easily; only the recesses in which the letters sat, and their attachment holes, remain. It reads thus, identically on both sides (with abbreviations completed in parentheses):

imp(eratori) · caes(ari) · fl(avio) · constantino · maximo · p(io) · f(elici) · avgusto · s(enatus) · p(opulus) · q(ue) · r(omanus) · qvod · instinctv · divinitatis · mentis · magnitvdine · cvm · exercitv · svo · tam · de · tyranno · qvam · de · omni · eivs · factione · vno · tempore · ivstis · rempvblicam · vltvs · est · armis · arcvm · trivmphis · insignem · dicavit

To the Emperor Caesar Flavius Constantinus, the greatest, pious, and blessed Augustus: because he, inspired by the divine, and by the greatness of his mind, has delivered the state from the tyrant and all of his followers at the same time, with his army and just force of arms, the Senate and People of Rome have dedicated this arch, decorated with triumphs.^[7]

The words instinctu divinitatis (“inspired by the divine”) have been greatly commented on. They are usually read as sign of Constantine’s shifting religious affiliation:^[7] The Christian tradition, most notably Lactantius and Eusebius of Caesarea, relate the story of a vision of God to Constantine during the campaign, and that he was victorious in the sign of the cross at the Milvian Bridge. The official documents (esp. coins) still prominently display the Sun god until 324, while Constantine started to support the Christian church from 312 on. In this situation, the vague wording of the inscription can be seen as the attempt to please all possible readers, being deliberately ambiguous, and acceptable to both pagans and Christians. As was customary, the vanquished enemy is not mentioned by name, but only referred to as “the tyrant”, drawing on the notion of the rightful killing of a tyrannical ruler; together with the image of the “just war“, it serves as justification of Constantine’s civil war against Maxentius.

Two short inscriptions on the inside of the central archway transport a similar message: Constantine came not as conqueror, but freed Rome from occupation:

liberatori vrbis (liberator of the city) — fundatori qvietis (founder of peace)

Over each of the small archways, inscriptions read:

votis x — votis xx

sic x — sic xx

They give a hint on the date of the arch: “Solemn vows for the 10th anniversary – for the 20th anniversary” and “as for the 10th, so for the 20th anniversary”. Both refer to Constantine’s decennalia, i.e. the 10th anniversary of his reign (counted from 306), which he celebrated in Rome in the summer of 315. It can be assumed that the arch honouring his victory was inaugurated during his stay in the city.

Works modeled on, or inspired by, the Arch of Constantine

• Brandenburg Gate, Potsdam, Prussia (1770)
• Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel, Paris, France (1806)
• Marble Arch, London, England (1828)
• Siegestor, Munich, Germany
• Union Station, Washington, D.C., USA (1908)
• American Museum of Natural History (Central Park West facade), New York City, USA (1936)
• Kedleston Hall, Derbyshire, UK
• Facade of Church of Saint-Denis, Paris, France
• Arch of triumph, Pyongyang, North Korea

Giacobbe Giusti, Arch of Constantine, Rome

Arch of Constantine, viewed from Colosseum looking south west to Palatine Hill

• List of Roman triumphal arches

Notes

1. Jump up^ By the “Senate and people” (S.P.Q.R.) according to the inscription, though the Emperor may have “suggested”. See also: A. L. Frothingham. “Who Built the Arch of Constantine? III.” The Attic, American Journal of Archaeology, Vol. 19, No. 1. (Jan. – Mar., 1915), pp. 1-12
2. Jump up^ Constantine chose to date his accessionbrate his decennalia in the year July 315 to July 316 ^[5]
3. Jump up^ Deane^[12] comments that Gradara^[13] published an excerpt from the diary of Pietro Bracci in 1732, in which Bracci states that he carved new heads for seven of the Dacian slaves surmounting the columns and a completely new statue for the eighth (right of centre, south side). He also made new heads for the emperors and other figures on the reliefs between the slaves
4. Jump up^ For which, see Conforto,^[14] however, for the contrary view that the whole arch was constructed in the 4th century, see Pensabene & Panella ^[15]
5. Jump up^ The controversy extends to a number of other public buildings attributed to Constantine, as hinted at by Aurelius Victor in De Caesaribus^[11]
6. Jump up^ The Arcus novus, was erected by Diocletianca. 314 on the Via lata, one of three triumphal arches on that road, and was destroyed ca. 1491 during reconstruction of Santa Maria in Via Lata. The remains, including the plinths are now in the Boboli Gardens, in Florence.^[26]

Citations

1. Jump up^ Watkin, David (2011). A History of Western Architecture: Fifth Edition. London: Laurence King Publishing. p. 87.
2. ^ Jump up to:^abcd Kitzinger 1977, p. 7.
3. ^ Jump up to:^ab Elsner 2000.
4. ^ Jump up to:^ab Lanciani 1892, p. 20.
5. Jump up^ Ferris 2013, p. 20.
6. ^ Jump up to:^abcde Ferris 2013, p. 7.
7. ^ Jump up to:^abcdef Aicher 2004, p. 184.
8. ^ Jump up to:^ab Stephenson, Paul (2010). Constantine: Roman Emperor, Christian Victor. New York: The Overlook Press. p. 151.
9. Jump up^ Barnes 1981, pp. 44–47.
10. Jump up^ Ferris 2013, p. 11.
11. ^ Jump up to:^abc Marlowe 2010.
12. Jump up^ Deane 1921, p. 91.
13. Jump up^ Gradara 1918.
14. Jump up^ Conforto 2001.
15. Jump up^ Pensabene & Panella 2001.
16. Jump up^ Frothingham 1912.
17. Jump up^ Kitzinger 1977, p. 29.
18. ^ Jump up to:^ab Kitzinger 1977, p. 8.
19. Jump up^ Kitzinger 1977, pp. 8–9.
20. Jump up^ Kitzinger 1977, pp. 9–12.
21. Jump up^ Kitzinger 1977, pp. 10–18.
22. ^ Jump up to:^ab Watkin, David (2011). A History Of Western Architecture. London: Laurence King Publishing. p. 88.
23. Jump up^ Kitzinger 1977, pp. 5–6, 9, 19.
24. Jump up^ Ferris 2013, p. 13.
25. Jump up^ Kitzinger 1977, pp. 8–15.
26. ^ Jump up to:^ab Ferris 2013, p. 21.
27. Jump up^ Bandinelli & Torelli 1992.
28. Jump up^ Follo et al 2015.

References

• Aicher, Peter J. (2004). Rome alive : a source-guide to the ancient city. Wauconda, Ill.: Bolchazy-Carducci. ISBN9780865164734. Retrieved 19 October 2015.
• Bandinelli, Ranuccio Bianchi; Torelli, Mario (1992). L’arte dell’antichità classica. Volume 2: Etruria-Roma (in Italian) (2nd ed.). Torino: Utet. ISBN9788877501950. Retrieved 23 October 2015.
• Barnes, Timothy D. (1981). Constantine and Eusebius. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ISBN978-0-674-16531-1.
• Conforto, Maria Letizia (2001). Adriano e Costantino: le due fasi dell’arco nella valle del Colosseo(in Italian). Milan: Electa. Retrieved 21 October 2015.
• Deane, Sidney N, ed. (January–March 1921). “Archaeological News July December 1920”. American Journal of Archaeology. 25 (1): 83–109. JSTOR497891.
• Elsner, Jaś (2000). “From the culture of spolia to the cult of relics: the Arch of Constantine and the genesis of late antique forms”. Papers of the British School at Rome. 68: 149–184. doi:10.1017/S0068246200003901. Retrieved 25 October 2015.
• Ferris, Iain (2013). The Arch of Constantine: Inspired by the Divine. Stroud: Amberley Publishing Limited. ISBN9781445635446. Retrieved 25 October 2015.
• Follo, Valentina; Harris, Beth; Zucker, Steven (2015). “Arch of Constantine” (video). Art of the Ancient Mediterranean: Roman. Khan Academy. Retrieved 21 October 2015.
• Frothingham, A. L. (July 1912). “Who Built the Arch of Constantine? Its History from Domitian to Constantine”. American Journal of Archaeology. 16 (3): 368. doi:10.2307/497194.
• Gradara, C (1918). “Restauri settecenteschi fatti all’Arco di Costantino”. Bullettino della Commissione Archeologica Communale di Roma (in Italian). 46: 161–164.
• Kitzinger, Ernst (1977). Byzantine art in the making: Main lines of stylistic development in mediterranean art, 3rd-7th century. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. ISBN9780674089556. Retrieved 21 October 2015.
  • Review: Art Bulletin 1979
• Pensabene, Patrizio; Panella, Clementina, eds. (2001). Arco di Costantino: tra archeologia e archeometria (in Italian). Rome: “L’Erma” di Bretschneider. ISBN9788882650360. Retrieved 21 October 2015.

Books

• Bonamente, Giorgio (ed.) 1992. Costantino il Grande dall’Antichità all’Umanesimo; Atti del 2. colloquio sul Cristianesimo nel mondo antico, Università di Macerata, 18-20 dicembre 1990
• Ewald, Björn C.; Noreña, Carlos F., eds. (2010). The emperor and Rome : space, representation, and ritual. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN9780521519533.
• Frothingham, Arthur Lincoln (2012). Who Built the Arch of Constantine?: Its History from Domitian to Constantine. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform. ISBN9781477633144. Retrieved 29 October 2015.
• Lanciani, Rodolfo Amedeo (1892). Pagan and Christian Rome. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin. Retrieved 25 October 2015.
• Lenski, Noel, ed. (2012) [2006]. The Cambridge companion to the Age of Constantine (Revised ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN9781107013407. Retrieved 26 October 2015.
• L’Orange, Hans Peter; Gerkan, Armin von (1939). Der spätantike Bildschmuck des Konstantinsbogens. Berlin: de Gruyter. ISBN9783110022490. Retrieved 26 October 2015.
• Middleton, John Henry (1892). The remains of ancient Rome. London: Adam and Charles Black. Retrieved 25 October 2015.
• Richardson, Lawrence (1992). A New Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN9780801843006. Retrieved 28 October 2015.
• Ryberg, Inez Scott (1967). Panel Reliefs of Marcus Aurelius (Monographs on archaeology and the fine arts, 14. ASIN: B0006BQ1JW). NY: Archaeological Institute of America. Retrieved 25 October 2015.
  • Contents
• Varner, Eric R. (2004). Monumenta Graeca et Romana. damnatio memoriae and Roman imperial portraiture. Leiden: Brill. ISBN90-04-13577-4.
• Weitzmann, Kurt, ed. (1979). Age of spirituality : late antique and early Christian art, third to seventh century : catalogue of the exhibition at the Metropolitan museum of art, November 19, 1977, through February 12, 1978. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art. ISBN9780870991790. Retrieved 26 October 2015.

Articles and chapters

• Bieber, Margarete (1911). “Die Medaillons am Konstantinsbogen”. Mitteilungen des Kaiserlich Deutschen Archaeologischen Instituts, Roemische Abtheilung (in German): 214–237. Retrieved 26 October 2015.
• Jones, H. Stuart (1906). “Notes on Roman historical sculptures: II The Relief-Medallions of the Arch of Constantine”. Papers of the British School at Rome. 3: 229–251. Retrieved 26 October 2015.
• Jones, Mark Wilson (March 2000). “Genesis and Mimesis: The Design of the Arch of Constantine in Rome”. The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. 59 (1): 50–77. doi:10.2307/991562.
• Koeppel, Gerhard (1986). “Die historischen Reliefs der römischen Kaiserzeit IV: Stadtrömische Denkmäler unbekannter Bauzugehörigkeit aus hadrianischer bis konstantinischer Zeit”. Bonner Jahrbücher. 186: 1–90.
• Marlowe, Elizabeth (June 2006). “Framing the Sun: The Arch of Constantine and the Roman Cityscape”. The Art Bulletin. 88 (2): 223–242. doi:10.1080/00043079.2006.10786288. JSTOR25067243. (Full text available on line)
• Marlowe, Elizabeth (2010). Liberator Urbis Suae: Constantine and the Ghost of Maxentius. in Ewald & Noreña (2010, pp. 199–219)
• Patrizio Pensabene (1992). Il reimpiego nell’età costantiniana a Roma, in Bonamente, Giorgio 1992 Pt. 2 p. 749-768

Arch of Constantine.

Arch of Constantine (Rome) in art.

• 1960 Summer Olympics official report. Volume 1. p. 80.
• 1960 Summer Olympics official report. Volume 2, Part 1. p. 118.
• The Arch of Constantine, a detailed article “for scholars and enthusiasts”
• Inscriptions illustrated and discussed
• Google Maps satellite image
• Guided tour of the Arch of Constantine on Roma Interactive
• High-resolution 360° Panoramas and Images of Arch of Constantine | Art Atlas

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arch_of_Constantine

http://www.giacobbegiusti.com

Giacobbe Giusti, Power and Pathos: Bronze Sculpture of the Hellenistic World

 

The J. Paul Getty Museum

Giacobbe Giusti,  Power and Pathos: Bronze Sculpture of the Hellenistic World

Boy Removing a Thorn from His Foot, “The Spinario,” about 50 B.C., bronze and copper. Musei Capitolini, Rome, Palazzo dei Conservatori, Sala dei Trionfi – foto Zeno Colantoni

July 28–November 1, 2015, Getty Center

During the Hellenistic period from the death of Alexander the Great in 323 B.C. until the establishment of the Roman Empire in 31 B.C., the medium of bronze drove artistic innovation. Sculptors moved beyond Classical norms, supplementing traditional subjects and idealized forms with realistic renderings of physical and emotional states. Bronze—surpassing marble with its tensile strength, reflective effects, and ability to hold fine detail—was employed for dynamic compositions, dazzling displays of the nude body, and graphic expressions of age and character.

Cast from alloys of copper, tin, lead, and other elements, bronze statues were produced in the thousands: honorific portraits of rulers and citizens populated city squares, and images of gods, heroes, and mortals crowded sanctuaries. Few, however, survive. This unprecedented exhibition unites fifty significant bronzes of the Hellenistic age. New discoveries appear with works known for centuries, and several closely related statues are presented side by side for the first time.

This exhibition was organized by the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, with the participation of the Soprintendenza per i Beni Archeologici della Toscana. It is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.

Bank of America is the National Sponsor of this touring exhibition. The Los Angeles presentation is also supported by the Getty Museum’s Villa Council, Vera R. Campbell Foundation, and the A. G. Leventis Foundation.

http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/power_pathos/

http://www.giacobbegiusti.com

 

Giacobbe Giusti, Bronze Sculpture Discovered in Georgia Goes on Display in Los Angeles

Giacobbe Giusti, Bronze Sculpture Discovered in Georgia Goes on Display in Los Angeles

An ancient statue dating back to the Bronze Age and discovered in Georgia goes on a display among the ancient world’s masterpieces in Los Angeles.

After the long term collaboration of the Georgian National Museum and J. Paul Getty Museum unidentified bronze statue named Torso of a Youth dated 2nd – 1st century BC, discovered in Vani settlement, wester Georgia were available to go on a display at the exhibition in the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

A major exhibition named Power and Pathos: Bronze Sculpture of the Hellenistic World was open at the Los Angeles Getty Museum on July 28 and will last until November 1.

Before moving to Los Angeles, following exhibition was presented at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence and after Getty Museum, exposition will move to the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

Other pieces which are exhibited at the Los Angeles Getty Museum are from world’s leading ancient museums, such are the British Museum in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Galleria degli Uffizi and the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Florence, the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Naples, the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, the Musйe du Louvre in Paris, and the Vatican Museums.

The exhibition in Los Angeles is organized by the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi in Florence and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, with the participation of the Tuscany’s directorate general for archaeology and it represents one of the largest expositions of this kind.

National Museum of Georgia is temporary housing of the statue, but as soon as Otar Lordkipanidze Vani Museum-Reserve will finish its large scale reconstruction works in 2016 the bronze torso of a youth will be returned at the original place.

 

 

 

Georgian National Museum currently takes part in one of the most important international cultural event. From 14 March to 21 June 2015, Palazzo Strozzi in Florence is hosting a major exhibition entitled “Power and Pathos”. Bronze Sculpture of the Hellenistic World, devised and produced in conjunction with the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the Soprintendenza per i Beni Archeologici della Toscana, Tuscany’s directorate general for archaeology.  The exhibition showcases a host of outstanding examples of bronze sculpture to tell the story of the spectacular artistic developments of the Hellenistic era (4th to 1st centuries BCE).

The exhibition hosts some of the most important masterpieces of the ancient world from many of the world’s leading archaeological museums including the British Museum in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Galleria degli Uffizi and the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Florence, the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Naples, the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, the Musée du Louvre in Paris, the Vatican Museums and the Georgian National Museum, which  represented bronze torso of a youth dated 2nd – 1st century BC, discovered in Vani settlement (Georgia).

Participation at the exhibition is due to the long term collaboration of Georgian National Museum and J. Paul Getty Museum. After the exhibition at Palazzo Strozzi, all exponents will be showcased at the National Gallery of Art in Washington and J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles in 2016.

As soon as Georgian National Museum Otar Lordkipanidze Vani Museum-Reserve will finish its large scale reconstructive works, bronze torso of a youth will be returned at the original place.

http://museum.ge/index.php?lang_id=ENG&sec_id=72&info_id=13315

http://georgiatoday.ge/news/938/Bronze-Sculpture-Discovered-in-Georgia-Goes-on-Display-in-Los-Angeles

http://www.giacobbegiusti.com

Giacobbe Giusti, Power and Pathos

Giacobbe Giusti, Power and Pathos

First Ever Major Exhibition of Hellenistic Bronze Sculptures Will Travel Internationally

 

MEDIA CONTACT:    
Amy Hood
Getty Communications
(310) 440-6427
ahood@getty.edu

Beginning in March 2015, the Palazzo Strozzi, Florence; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., will present Power and Pathos: Bronze Sculpture of the Hellenistic World, the first major international exhibition to bring together approximately 50 ancient bronzes from the Mediterranean region and beyond ranging from the 4th century B.C. to the 1st century A.D.

“The representation of the human figure is central to the art of almost all ancient cultures, but nowhere did it have greater importance, or more influence on later art history, than in Greece,” says Timothy Potts, director of the J. Paul Getty Museum. “It was in the Hellenistic period that sculptors pushed to the limit the dramatic effects of billowing drapery, tousled hair, and the astonishingly detailed renderings of veins, wrinkles, tendons, and musculature, making the sculpture of their time the most life-like and emotionally charged ever made, and still one of the highpoints of European art history. At its best, Hellenistic sculpture leaves nothing to be desired or improved upon. The 50 or so works in the exhibition represent the finest of these spectacular and extremely rare works that survive, and makes this one of the most important exhibitions of ancient classical sculpture ever mounted. This is a must-see event for anyone with an interest in classical art or sculpture.”

Potts continues: “The Getty Museum is proud to be collaborating on this project with our colleagues in Florence at the Palazzo Strozzi, the Museo Archeologico Nazionale, and the Soprintendenza per i Beni Archeologici della Toscana, along with the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C..”

During the Hellenistic era artists around the Mediterranean created innovative, realistic sculptures of physical power and emotional intensity. Bronze—with its reflective surface, tensile strength, and ability to hold the finest details—was employed for dynamic compositions, graphic expressions of age and character, and dazzling displays of the human form.

From sculptures known since the Renaissance, such as the Arringatore (Orator) from Sanguineto (in the collection of the Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Florence), to spectacular recent discoveries that have never before been exhibited in the United States, the exhibition is the most comprehensive museum survey of Hellenistic bronzes ever organized. In each showing of the exhibition, recent finds—many salvaged from the sea—will be exhibited for the first time alongside famous works from the world’s leading museums. The works of art on view will range in scale from statuettes, busts and heads to life-size figures and herms.

Power and Pathos: Bronze Sculpture of the Hellenistic World is especially remarkable for bringing together works of art that, because of their rarity, are usually exhibited in isolation. When viewed in proximity to one another, the variety of styles and techniques employed by ancient sculptors is emphasized to greater effect, as are the varying functions and histories of the bronze sculptures.

Bronze was a material well-suited to reproduction, and the exhibition provides an unprecedented opportunity to see objects of the same type, and even from the same workshop together for the first time.

The travel schedule for Power and Pathos: Bronze Sculpture of the Hellenistic World is:

Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, Italy
March 14 – June 21, 2015
http://www.palazzostrozzi.org

J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA
July 28 – November 1, 2015
http://www.getty.edu

National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
December 6, 2015 – March 20, 2016
http://www.nga.gov

This exhibition is curated by Jens Daehner and Kenneth Lapatin of the J. Paul Getty Museum and co-organized by the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Florence; and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; with the participation of Soprintendenza per i Beni Archeologici della Toscana. It is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.

Bank of America is the National Sponsor of this touring exhibition. The Los Angeles presentation is also supported by the Getty Museum’s Villa Council, Vera R. Campbell Foundation, and the A. G. Leventis Foundation.

http://news.getty.edu/press-materials/press-releases/power-and-pathos-hellenistic-bronze-sculpture.print

http://www.giacobbegiusti.com

Giacobbe Giusti, Antikythera Ephebe

Giacobbe Giusti, Antikythera Ephebe

 

 

 

 

The Antikythera Ephebe is a bronze statue of a young man of languorous grace that was found in 1900 by sponge-divers in the area of the ancient Antikythera shipwreck off the island of Antikythera, Greece. It was the first of the series of Greek bronze sculptures that the Aegean and Mediterranean yielded up in the twentieth century which have fundamentally altered the modern view of Ancient Greek sculpture.^[1] The wreck site, which is dated about 70–60 BC, also yielded the Antikythera Mechanism, an astronomical calculating device, a characterful head of a Stoic philosopher, and a hoard of coins. The coins included a disproportionate quantity of Pergamene cistophoric tetradrachms and Ephesian coins, leading scholars to surmise that it had begun its journey on the Ionian coast, perhaps at Ephesus; none of its recovered cargo has been identified as from mainland Greece.^[2]

The Ephebe, which measures 1.94 meters, slightly over lifesize, was retrieved in numerous fragments. Its first restoration was revised in the 1950s, under the direction of Christos Karouzos, changing the focus of the eyes, the configuration of the abdomen, the connection between the torso and the right upper thigh and the position of the right arm; the re-restoration is universally considered a success.^[2]

                         

The Antikythera Ephebe

The Ephebe does not correspond to any familiar iconographic model, and there are no known copies of the type. He held a spherical object in his right hand,^[3] and possibly may have represented Paris presenting the Apple of Discord to Aphrodite; however, since Paris is consistently depicted cloaked and with the distinctive Phrygian cap, other scholars have suggested a beardless, youthful Heracles with the Apple of the Hesperides.^[2] It has also been suggested that the youth is a depiction of Perseus holding the head of the slain Gorgon.^[2] At any rate, the loss of the context of the Antikythera Ephebe has stripped it of its original cultural meaning.

The Ephebe, dated by its style to about 340 BC, is one of the most brilliant products of Peloponnesian bronze sculpture; the individuality and character it displays have encouraged speculation on its possible sculptor. It is, perhaps, the work of the famous sculptor Euphranor, trained in the Polyclitan tradition, who did make a sculpture of Paris, according to Pliny:

“By Euphranor is an Alexander [Paris]. This work is specially admired, because the eye can detect in it at once the judge of the goddesses, the lover of Helen, and yet the slayer of Achilles.“^[4]

The Antikythera Ephebe is conserved in the National Archaeological Museum of Athens.^[5]

Notes

1. Other well-known underwater bronze finds have been retrieved, generally from shipwreck sites: the Mahdia shipwreck off the coast of Tunisia, 1907; the Marathon Boy off the coast of Marathon, 1925; the standing Poseidon of Cape Artemision found off Cape Artemision in northern Euboea, 1926; the horse and Rider found off Cape Artemision, 1928 and 1937; the Getty Victorious Youth found off Fano, Italy, in 1964; the Riace bronzes, found in 1972; the Dancing Satyr of Mazara del Vallo, near Brindisi, 1992; and the Apoxyomenos‘ recovered from the sea off the Croatian island of Lošinj in 1999.
2.  Myers 1999
3.  Minute fragments of bronze adhere to the fingers (Myers 1999).
4.  Natural Histories, 34.77: Euphranoris Alexander Paris est in quo laudatur quod omnia simul intelliguntur, iudex dearum, amator Helenae et tamen Achillis interfector.
5.  Inv. no. 13396.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_Ephebe

http://www.giacobbegiusti.com

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

 

http://www.giacobbegiusti.com

estimento di Potere e pathosda Palazzo Strozzi (Firenze)

Giacobbe Giusti, Le Gaulois

Giacobbe Giusti, Le Gaulois

 

Gaulois captif, en bronze. Fouille du Rhône. Musée départemental Arles antique

                            

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                         

 

Le Gaulois découvert en 2007 a ses mains liées dans le dos et son genou à terre. Il commémore la victoire de César sur la Gaule. Ce type iconographique se retrouve sur plusieurs pièces de l’époque. Sa chevelure fournie et sa barbe sont là pour rappeler le barbare qu’il est face aux romains, quant à sa posture toujours fière malgré la soumission, elle accentue la puissance du vainqueur face à la force du vaincu.

https://museis.wordpress.com/taghttps://museis/2/

 

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