The Hermes of the Museo Pio-Clementino is an ancient Roman sculpture, part of the Vatican collections, Rome. It was long admired as the Belvedere Antinous, named from its prominent placement in the Cortile del Belvedere. It is now inventory number 907 in the Museo Pio-Clementino.
Its idealized face is not in fact that of Antinous, the Emperor Hadrian's beloved. [1] The cloak known as a chlamys , thrown over the left shoulder and wrapped round the left forearm, and the relaxed contrapposto identify the sculpture as a Hermes, one of a familiar Praxitelean type. Today the sculpture is considered (in the most recent Helbig [2] ) to be a Hadrianic copy (early second century AD) of a bronze by Praxiteles or one of his school.
At 1.95 m (6 ft 5 in) tall, the statue shows a nude young man with a chlamys on his shoulder and left forearm. It is a variant of the Andros type; [3] the Andros example has the chlamys and a serpent twined round the tree-support, with the tree and serpent allowing its definite identification as Hermes as psychopompus; it is directly influenced by the Hermes and the Infant Dionysus of Praxiteles. [4]
The sculpture was bought for Pope Paul III in 1543, when a thousand ducats were paid to "Nicolaus de Palis for a very beautiful marble statue... which His Holiness has sent to be placed in the Belvedere garden". [5] The most likely site for its discovery is in a garden near Castel Sant'Angelo, [6] where the Palis had property.
The statue was immediately famous, as the Antinous Admirandus: it was mentioned in all the accounts of the antiquities to be seen in Rome, engraved in all the repertories of classical art, universally admired and copied in bronze and marble for Fontainebleau in the sixteenth century and Versailles in the seventeenth century. A bronze copy by Hubert Le Sueur figured in the collections of Charles I of England before being acquired by Oliver Cromwell, [7] while another cast by the Keller brothers came into the collection of Louis XIV of France. [8] A marble copy was bought by Peter the Great [9] and casts can also be found in art academies such as those of Milan and Berlin. [10]
Peter Paul Rubens studied the sculpture during his stay in Rome in the early 17th century and praised its beauty and proportions. The statue likely inspired him for the figure of Christ in the central panel of The Rockox Triptych (Rubens) painted in 1615. [11] Poussin saw in it a canon of ideal proportions [12] and in 1683, Gérard Audran included it in his collection of engravings representing the Proportions of the human body measured from the most beautiful statues of antiquity, meant for young sculptors. [13] Winckelmann recognised it as a statue "of the first class" and much admired the head, "undoubtedly one of the most beautiful heads of a young man from Antiquity", even though he criticised the working of its feet, stomach and legs [14] In Winckelmann's time the statue's identification as Antinous had already been disproved, and the statue was interpreted instead as a Meleager, hero of the hunt for the Calydonian Boar. It was finally identified as Hermes by the scholar Ennio Quirino Visconti, in his catalogue of the Museo Pio-Clementino (1818–1822). [15]
Praxiteles of Athens, the son of Cephisodotus the Elder, was the most renowned of the Attica sculptors of the 4th century BC. He was the first to sculpt the nude female form in a life-size statue. While no indubitably attributable sculpture by Praxiteles is extant, numerous copies of his works have survived; several authors, including Pliny the Elder, wrote of his works; and coins engraved with silhouettes of his various famous statuary types from the period still exist.
The Vatican Museums are the public museums of Vatican City. They display works from the immense collection amassed by the Catholic Church and the papacy throughout the centuries, including several of the most well-known Roman sculptures and most important masterpieces of Renaissance art in the world. The museums contain roughly 70,000 works, of which 20,000 are on display, and currently employs 640 people who work in 40 different administrative, scholarly, and restoration departments.
The Doryphoros of Polykleitos is one of the best known Greek sculptures of Classical antiquity, depicting a solidly built, muscular, standing warrior, originally bearing a spear balanced on his left shoulder. Rendered somewhat above life-size, the lost bronze original of the work would have been cast circa 440 BC, but it is today known only from later marble copies. The work nonetheless forms an important early example of both Classical Greek contrapposto and classical realism; as such, the iconic Doryphoros proved highly influential elsewhere in ancient art.
The Apollo Belvedere is a celebrated marble sculpture from classical antiquity.
The Aphrodite of Knidos was an Ancient Greek sculpture of the goddess Aphrodite created by Praxiteles of Athens around the 4th century BC. It was one of the first life-sized representations of the nude female form in Greek history, displaying an alternative idea to male heroic nudity. Praxiteles' Aphrodite was shown nude, reaching for a bath towel while covering her pubis, which, in turn leaves her breasts exposed. Up until this point, Greek sculpture had been dominated by male nude figures. The original Greek sculpture is no longer in existence; however, many Roman copies survive of this influential work of art. Variants of the Venus Pudica are the Venus de' Medici and the Capitoline Venus.
The Ludovisi Ares is an Antonine Roman marble sculpture of Ares, 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.
Ennio Quirino Visconti was a Roman politician, antiquarian, and art historian, papal Prefect of Antiquities, and the leading expert of his day in the field of ancient Roman sculpture. His son, Pietro Ercole Visconti, edited Versi di Ennio Quirino Visconti, raccolti per cura di Pietro Visconti while Louis Visconti became a noted architect in France. His brother, Filippo Aurelio Visconti was also a classical scholar, who published the Museo Chiaramonti, a successor to the Museo Pio-Clementino.
The Belvedere Torso is a 1.59-metre-tall (5.2 ft) fragmentary marble statue of a male nude, known to be in Rome from the 1430s, and signed prominently on the front of the base by "Apollonios, son of Nestor, Athenian", who is unmentioned in ancient literature. It is now in the Museo Pio-Clementino of the Vatican Museums.
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 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.
The Colonna Venus is a Roman marble copy of the lost Aphrodite of Cnidus sculpture by Praxiteles, conserved in the Museo Pio-Clementino as a part of the Vatican Museums' collections. It is now the best-known and perhaps most faithful Roman copy of Praxiteles's original.
The Capitoline Venus is a type of statue of Venus, specifically one of several Venus Pudica types, of which several examples exist. The type ultimately derives from the Aphrodite of Cnidus. The Capitoline Venus and her variants are recognisable from the position of the arms—standing after a bath, Venus begins to cover her breasts with her right hand, and her groin with her left hand.
The Capitoline 'Antinous' is a marble statue of a young nude male found at Hadrian's Villa, Tivoli, during the time when Conte Giuseppe Fede was undertaking the earliest concerted excavations there. It was bought before 1733 by Alessandro Cardinal Albani. To contemporaries it seemed to be the real attraction of his collection. The statue was bought by Pope Clement XII in 1733 and went on to form the nucleus of the Capitoline Museums, Rome, where it remains. The restored left leg and the left arm, with its unexpected rhetorical hand gesture, were provided by Pietro Bracci. In the 18th century it was considered to be one of the most beautiful Roman copies of a Greek statue in the world. It was then thought to represent Hadrian's lover Antinous owing to its fleshy face and physique and downturned look. It was part of the artistic loot taken to Paris under the terms of the Treaty of Tolentino (1797) and remained in Paris 1800–15, when it was returned to Rome after the fall of Napoleon.
The Dionysus Sardanapalus is an uncommon Hellenistic-Roman Neo Attic sculpture-type of the god Dionysus, misnamed after the king Sardanapalus. Unlike most contemporary figurations of Dionysus as a lithe youth, the self-consciously archaising god is heavily draped, with an ivy wreath and a long archaic-style beard; probably he bore a thyrsos in a raised right hand, now missing.
The Castor and Pollux group is an ancient Roman sculptural group of the 1st century AD, now in the Museo del Prado, Madrid.
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.
Hermes and the Infant Dionysus, also known as the Hermes of Praxiteles or the Hermes of Olympia is an ancient Greek sculpture of Hermes and the infant Dionysus discovered in 1877 in the ruins of the Temple of Hera, Olympia, in Greece. It is displayed at the Archaeological Museum of Olympia.
The marble Cupid and Psyche conserved in the Capitoline Museums, Rome, is a 1st or 2nd century Roman copy of a late Hellenistic period original. It was given to the nascent Capitoline Museums by Pope Benedict XIV in 1749, shortly after its discovery. Its graceful balance and sentimental appearance made it a favourite among the neoclassical generations of artists and visitors, and it was copied in many materials from bronze to biscuit porcelain. Antonio Canova consciously set out to outdo the Antique original with his own Cupid and Psyche of 1808
The Sleeping Ariadne, housed in the Vatican Museums in Vatican City, is a Roman Hadrianic copy of a Hellenistic sculpture of the Pergamene school of the 2nd century BC, and is one of the most renowned sculptures of Antiquity. The reclining figure in a chiton bound under her breasts half lies, half sits, her extended legs crossed at the calves, her head pillowed on her left arm, her right thrown over her head. Other Roman copies of this model exist: one, the "Wilton House Ariadne", is substantially unrestored, while another, the "Medici Ariadne" found in Rome, has been "seriously reworked in modern times", according to Brunilde Sismondo Ridgway. Two surviving statuettes attest to a Roman trade in reductions of this familiar figure. A variant Sleeping Ariadne is in the Prado Museum, Madrid. A later Roman variant found in the Villa Borghese gardens, Rome, is at the Louvre Museum.
The Diana of Gabii is a statue of a woman in drapery which probably represents the goddess Artemis and is traditionally attributed to the sculptor Praxiteles. It became part of the Borghese collection and is now conserved in the Louvre with the inventory number Ma 529.
