The Guilford Puteal [1] is a Pentelic marble Ancient Roman sculpture. Its name derives from its use as a puteal or wellhead, and one of its previous owners, Frederick North, second Earl of Guilford. Its discovery in Corinth gives rise to an alternative modern name, the Corinth Puteal.
The puteal—wellhead is a cylindrical drum 50 cm by 106 cm and dates to circa 30-10 BC. It is part of a commemorative memorial in the city of ancient Corinth, which at that time had recently been refounded by Augustus's adoptive father Julius Caesar, that celebrated Augustus's victory at the battle of Actium. Work is ongoing to locate the likely original site of the monument from which it came, perhaps even with part of its missing moulding restored.
The wellhead is decorated in bas-relief, with ten figures of deities and heroes. At the front two small processions meet: on the left is Apollo with his lyre (Augustus's patron deity) who leads Artemis (trailing her stag) and another female figure, probably their mother Leto. Behind Leto, from left to right, is Hermes/Mercury (in winged sandals) leading three dancing women or nymphs. On the right is Athena/Minerva (another patron of Augustus, her arm extended to hold her helmet) leading Herakles/Hercules (with his club on his shoulder and a quiver beneath his arm, patron of Augustus's defeated enemy Mark Antony) and a veiled woman (Hera, Aphrodite or Heracles's bride Hebe). The figures were spaced wide apart, and were designed in the Neo Attic style, a Roman version of the archaic sixth century BC Greek style.
Similar examples include:
It was used as a well-head after antiquity, either by a 19th-century Turkish owner or possibly earlier. This Turk displayed it the right way up, endangering the remains of the figures through friction of the well-rope against the marble. [3] Its next owner was Notara, a cultured Greek official with a fine library who was a member of a distinguished family who could trace their descent back to the Byzantine Palaeologi; Notara also used it in his garden as a wellhead but inverted it in an attempt to save it from further damage. By the time it passed to him its upper moulding, much of the bead-and-reel decoration of its lower moulding, and (most likely from an act of vandalism of unknown date, perhaps related to iconoclasm) the heads of the figures moving in two processions around the drum had all already been lost.
In the earliest years of the nineteenth century Notara presided over a guest-house for western travellers to Corinth, by which circumstances the Guilford Puteal became known to western Europeans. While there it was seen by Edward Dodwell in 1805 and drawn by his artist Simone Pomardi, and was described by Dodwell in his account of his travels in Greece. [4] It was seen by Colonel William Leake in 1806. Dodwell perceptively recognised its close links with a relief in the collection of the Villa Albani in Rome, catalogued in the eighteenth century by Winckelmann. Otto Magnus von Stackelberg also drew casts of it, which had been taken to Athens.
It was then acquired by Frederick North (later Earl of Guilford) in 1810 at Corinth. It was among the sixty crates of marble sculpture he shipped from Greece in 1813. These were for display at his London house in Westminster, which he never inhabited but which contained his library and collections; [5] it was acquired with its contents on his death in 1827 by Thomas Wentworth Beaumont, an MP and member of a Yorkshire family. It was he who moved it to Bretton Hall for display, possibly in the stables built in 1830 by George Basevi, better known as the architect of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.
When the German scholar Adolf Michaelis came to compile his great work, Ancient Marbles in Great Britain in the 1860s, the Guilford Puteal's location had already been lost to academia, and so he issued a rallying-cry in an article in the Journal of Hellenic Studies (vol. 5, 1884). A century later, its whereabouts still remained unknown and the object only known through drawings and reproductions of casts.
Meanwhile, it passed with Bretton Hall to West Riding County Council (in 1947, becoming a teacher training college) and then (in 2000) to Leeds University. In 1992 Peter Brears, curator of Leeds City Museum, and Bretton Hall fine art professor David Hill, sent a letter to the British Museum's Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities, rightly surmising that a couple of sculptures in the Hall's gardens were ancient and of interest. One was the Puteal, then in use as a planter. By 1995, a keeper of the British Museum was then able to match figures from Pomardi and von Stackelberg's drawings to Brears's slides of the sculptures. This positive identification led to the sculpture's being moved and conserved using the British Museum's and Henry Moore Foundation expertise, but it was not exhibited at this time, despite plans to do so.
On the College's absorption into Leeds University, the HEFCE instructed the University to put the Puteal and an altar from the same collection on the art market.
By 2002 Christie's had valued them and an overseas sale had been negotiated. However, at the same time the Nicopolis examples were found and came to the attention of the same BM keeper. This discovery, giving it a date and context for the first time, allowed the Department of Culture, Media and Sport to stop export of the Guilford Puteal while the British Museum raised the necessary funds to acquire it. It was eventually bought for £294,009 (including an £108,000 Art Fund grant and other money from the Heritage Lottery Fund, the British Museum Friends and the Caryatids of the Greek and Roman Department) - this would have been higher had it gone onto the open market and through the usual sales processes, or if the Museum had not been able to respond as rapidly as it could due to the Nicopolis discovery.
As part of the University-College merger agreement with HEFCE, 80% of the proceeds went to the HEFCE and 20% to the University to offset the significant investment both the University and College had made to the pieces' upkeep.
At the British Museum the Guilford Puteal was at first displayed as a triumphant new acquisition in the Round Reading Room in the Queen Elizabeth II Great Court, but is now on display in the limited-opening Room 83 in the basement.
Corinth is a municipality in Corinthia in Greece. The successor to the ancient city of Corinth, it is a former municipality in Corinthia, Peloponnese, which is located in south-central Greece. Since the 2011 local government reform, it has been part of the municipality of Corinth, of which it is the seat and a municipal unit. It is the capital of Corinthia.
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Ancient Greek architecture came from the Greeks, or Hellenes, whose culture flourished on the Greek mainland, the Peloponnese, the Aegean Islands, and in colonies in Anatolia and Italy for a period from about 900 BC until the 1st century AD, with the earliest remaining architectural works dating from around 600 BC.
The Elgin Marbles are a collection of Ancient Greek sculptures from the Parthenon and other structures from the Acropolis of Athens, removed from Ottoman Greece and shipped to Britain by agents of Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin, and now held in the British Museum in London. The majority of the sculptures were created in the 5th century BC under the direction of sculptor and architect Phidias.
Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin and 11th Earl of Kincardine,, often known as Lord Elgin, was a Scottish nobleman, diplomat, and collector, known primarily for the controversial procurement of marble sculptures from the Parthenon and other structures on the Acropolis of Athens.
A caryatid is a sculpted female figure serving as an architectural support taking the place of a column or a pillar supporting an entablature on her head. The Greek term karyatides literally means "maidens of Karyai", an ancient town on the Peloponnese. Karyai had a temple dedicated to the goddess Artemis in her aspect of Artemis Karyatis: "As Karyatis she rejoiced in the dances of the nut-tree village of Karyai, those Karyatides, who in their ecstatic round-dance carried on their heads baskets of live reeds, as if they were dancing plants".
Nicopolis or Actia Nicopolis was the capital city of the Roman province of Epirus Vetus. It is located near Preveza, Greece. The city was founded in 29 BC by Octavian in commemoration of his victory in 31 BC over Antony and Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium nearby.
The Glyptothek is a museum in Munich, Germany, which was commissioned by the Bavarian King Ludwig I to house his collection of Greek and Roman sculptures. It was designed by Leo von Klenze in the neoclassical style, and built from 1816 to 1830. Today the museum is a part of the Kunstareal.
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Adolf Michaelis was a German classical scholar, a professor of art history at the University of Strasbourg from 1872, who helped establish the connoisseurship of Ancient Greek sculpture and Roman sculpture on their modern footing. Just at the cusp of the introduction of photography as a tool of art history, Michaelis pioneered supplementing his descriptions with sketches.
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Ian Dennis Jenkins was a Senior Curator at the British Museum who was an expert on ancient Greece and specialised in ancient Greek sculpture. Jenkins published a number of books and more than a hundred articles. He led the British Museum's excavations at Cnidus and was involved in the debate over the ownership of the Elgin Marbles.
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