The Giustiniani Hestia is a finely-executed marble sculpture, a perhaps Hadrianic Roman copy of a Greek bronze of about 470 BCE, now in the Torlonia Collection (see Torlonia Museum), Rome, but named for its early owner, marchese Vincenzo Giustiniani. It is the only known Early Classical bronze that was reproduced at full size in marble for a Roman collection: Roman taste ran more towards the Hellenistic baroque.
Winckelmann cited the Hestia Giustiniani as an example of the austere early stage of Classical Greek sculpture. For female figures, early fifth-century sculptors mostly gave up the crinkly sleeved chiton , which had been popular in the later sixth century BCE, and returned to the sleeveless peplos with heavy, dominantly vertical folds not unlike the fluting of a column. [1] With the body so shrouded the relaxation of pose has been limited to turning the head. Several Attic or Argive sculptors have been speculatively suggested as the author of the lost original.
The sculpture was known in the Giustiniani collection in Palazzo Giustiniani, Rome, from the early 1630s, the date of a drawing made for the antiquarian Cassiano dal Pozzo [2] and was illustrated in the engraved catalogue of the Galleria Giustiniani, produced under the direction of Joachim von Sandrart in two deluxe volumes, 1635–36 and 1638 [3] In its first appearance in a Giustiniani inventory, 1638, it was a "vergine vestale vestita, di marmo greco tutta antica alta palmi 9" (quoted by Lachenal), "a clothed Vestal Virgin, of Greek marble wholly antique, height 9 palmi." The sculpture appeared in François Perrier, Segmenta nobilium signorum (Paris and Rome, 1638), plate lxxii. The Hestia was purchased from the Giustiniani heirs in the nineteenth century and re-erected in Palazzo Lungara, where it was described by Ennio Quirino Visconti. It was removed to the Torlonia Villa Albani after World War II and was reinstalled in the 1990s in the courtyard of the Palazzo Torlonia in via della Conciliazione.
Contemporary scholars are less certain about the sculpture's identification as Hestia, in part because of literary references to her imageless sanctuaries, [4] though a similar figure is painted on a cup at Berlin attributed to the Sosias Painter (Lachenal): Demeter and Hera are alternative candidates. Often such attribution issues are skirted in modern scholarship by designating such sculptures simply as peplophoroi ("peplum-wearers")
The Farnese Hercules is an ancient statue of Hercules, probably an enlarged copy made in the early third century AD and signed by Glykon, who is otherwise unknown; the name is Greek but he may have worked in Rome. Like many other Ancient Roman sculptures it is a copy or version of a much older Greek original that was well known, in this case a bronze by Lysippos that would have been made in the fourth century BC. This original survived for over 1500 years until it was melted down by Crusaders in 1205 during the Sack of Constantinople. The enlarged copy was made for the Baths of Caracalla in Rome, where the statue was recovered in 1546, and is now in the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Naples. The heroically-scaled Hercules is one of the most famous sculptures of antiquity, and has fixed the image of the mythic hero in the European imagination.
Scopas was an ancient Greek sculptor and architect, most famous for his statue of Meleager, the copper statue of Aphrodite, and the head of goddess Hygieia, daughter of Asclepius.
The Discobolus by Myron is an ancient Greek sculpture completed at the start of the Classical period in around 460–450 BC that depicts an ancient Greek athlete throwing a discus. Its Greek original in bronze lost, the work is known through numerous Roman copies, both full-scale ones in marble, which is cheaper than bronze, such as the Palombara Discobolus, the first to be recovered, and smaller scaled versions in bronze.
The Dying Gaul, also called The Dying Galatian or The Dying Gladiator, is an ancient Roman marble semi-recumbent statue now in the Capitoline Museums in Rome. It is a copy of a now lost sculpture from the Hellenistic period thought to have been made in bronze. The original may have been commissioned at some time between 230 and 220 BC by Attalus I of Pergamon to celebrate his victory over the Galatians, the Celtic or Gaulish people of parts of Anatolia. The original sculptor is believed to have been Epigonus, a court sculptor of the Attalid dynasty of Pergamon.
The Torlonia Museum was a museum in Rome, which housed the Torlonia Collection of ancient sculptures.
The life-size ancient but much restored marble statue known as the Barberini Faun, Fauno Barberini or Drunken Satyr is now in the Glyptothek in Munich, Germany. A faun is the Roman equivalent of a Greek satyr. In Greek mythology, satyrs were human-like male woodland spirits with several animal features, often a goat-like tail, hooves, ears, or horns. Satyrs attended Dionysus.
The Ludovisi Ares is an Antonine Roman marble sculpture of Mars, a fine 2nd-century copy of a late 4th-century BCE Greek original, associated with Scopas or Lysippus: thus the Roman god of war receives his Greek name, Ares.
François Duquesnoy or Frans Duquesnoy was a Flemish Baroque sculptor who was active in Rome for most of his career, where he was known as Il Fiammingo. His idealized representations represented a quieter and more restrained version of Italian baroque sculpture, and are often contrasted with the more dramatic and emotional character of Bernini's works, while his style shows a great affinity to Algardi's sculptures.
The study of Roman sculpture is complicated by its relation to Greek sculpture. Many examples of even the most famous Greek sculptures, such as the Apollo Belvedere and Barberini Faun, are known only from Roman Imperial or Hellenistic "copies". At one time, this imitation was taken by art historians as indicating a narrowness of the Roman artistic imagination, but, in the late 20th century, Roman art began to be reevaluated on its own terms: some impressions of the nature of Greek sculpture may in fact be based on Roman artistry.
Marchese Vincenzo Giustiniani was an aristocratic Italian banker, art collector and intellectual of the late 16th and early 17th centuries, known today largely for the Giustiniani art collection, assembled at the Palazzo Giustiniani, near the Pantheon, in Rome, and at the family palazzo at Bassano by Vincenzo and his brother, Cardinal Benedetto, and for his patronage of the artist Caravaggio.
The Chimera of Arezzo is regarded as the best example of ancient Etruscan art. The British art historian David Ekserdjian described the sculpture as "one of the most arresting of all animal sculptures and the supreme masterpiece of Etruscan bronze-casting". Made entirely of bronze and measuring 78.5 cm high with a length of 129 cm, it was found alongside a small collection of other bronze statues in Arezzo, an ancient Etruscan and Roman city in Tuscany. The statue was originally part of a larger sculptural group representing a fight between a Chimera and the Greek hero Bellerophon. This sculpture is likely to have been created as a votive offering to the Etruscan god Tinia.
The National Roman Museum is a museum, with several branches in separate buildings throughout the city of Rome, Italy. It shows exhibits from the pre- and early history of Rome, with a focus on archaeological findings from the period of Ancient Rome.
Giovanni Francesco (Gianfrancesco) Susini was a Mannerist Florentine sculptor in bronze and marble.
The Venus de' Medici or Medici Venus is a 1.53 m tall Hellenistic marble sculpture depicting the Greek goddess of love Aphrodite. It is a 1st-century BC marble copy, perhaps made in Athens, of a bronze original Greek sculpture, following the type of the Aphrodite of Knidos, which would have been made by a sculptor in the immediate Praxitelean tradition, perhaps at the end of the century. It has become one of the navigation points by which the progress of the Western classical tradition is traced, the references to it outline the changes of taste and the process of classical scholarship. It is housed in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy.
The Ludovisi Gaul is an ancient Roman statue depicting a Gallic man plunging a sword into his breast as he holds up the dying body of his wife. This sculpture is a marble copy of a now lost Greek bronze original. The Ludovisi Gaul can be found today in the Palazzo Altemps in Rome. This statue is unique for its time because it was common to depict the victor but instead, the Ludovisi Gaul depicts the defeated.
The Athena Giustiniani or Minerva Giustiniani is a Roman marble statue of Pallas Athena, based on a Greek bronze sculpture of the late 5th–early 4th century BCE. Formerly in the collection of Vincenzo Giustiniani, it is now in the Vatican Museums.
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Bartolomeo Cavaceppi was an Italian sculptor who worked in Rome, where he trained in the studio of the acclimatized Frenchman, Pierre-Étienne Monnot, and then in the workshop of Carlo Antonio Napolioni, a restorer of sculptures for Cardinal Alessandro Albani, who was to become a major patron of Cavaceppi, and a purveyer of antiquities and copies on his own account. The two sculptors shared a studio. Much of his work was in restoring antique Roman sculptures, making casts, copies, and fakes of antiques, fields in which he was pre-eminent and which brought him into contact with all the virtuosi: he was a close friend of and informant for Johann Joachim Winckelmann. Winckelmann's influence and Cardinal Albani's own evolving taste may have contributed to Cavaceppi's increased self-consciousness of the appropriateness of restorations — a field in which earlier sculptors had improvised broadly — evinced in his introductory essay to his Raccolta d'antiche statue, busti, teste cognite ed altre sculture antiche restaurate da Cav. Bartolomeo Cavaceppi scultore romano. The baroque taste in ornate restorations of antiquities had favoured finely pumiced polished surfaces, coloured marbles and mixed media, and highly speculative restorations of sometimes incongruous fragments. Only in the nineteenth century, would collectors begin for the first time to appreciate fragments of sculpture: a headless torso was not easily sold in eighteenth-century Rome.
The Cleveland Apollo is a 4th-century BCE life-size bronze statue, now in the Cleveland Museum of Art. It has acquired it in 2004 using the Severance and Greta Millikin Purchase
The Torlonia Collection is a private art collection of 620 Ancient Greek and Roman art works assembled by the noble Torlonia family of Rome, Italy. It has been called "the greatest private collection of ancient Roman antiquity" by archaeologist Darius Arya. Around 180 pieces are busts, one of the largest collections of Roman portraiture in the world.