The book is the last of a twenty-part series dedicated to Cassiano dal Pozzo’s Paper Museum. An abridged introduction of three pages (by Francis Haskell and Henrietta McBurney) presents the Paper Museum and the series. The current volume publishes 207 drawings of free-standing sculpture, made between 1638 and the late 1680s. The authors present them in an order that considers the commissioner and then depends mainly on the late eighteenth-early nineteenth-century typological division created in London at the Royal Library.
The catalogue begins with the drawings commissioned by Cassiano (d. 1657) and his brother, Carlo Antonio (d. 1689): statues 1-55; statue fragments; hands and feet, 56-63; trophies, 64-71; phallic sculptures, 72-74; statuettes, 75-128; herms, 129-133; busts and heads 134-194; and masks, 195-199. Then follow eight “acquired drawings”, which the brothers purchased or received as gifts, 200-206 and an addendum 207. The order, prioritizing the drawing, means that the same object can appear in different places in the catalogue; for example, drawings 8 and 15 show the same torso drawn by an unknown artist and one in the circle of Pietro da Cortona, and 207 by Vincenzo Leonardi shows a detail of the neckline of a statuette of the Artemis of Ephesus which Pietro Testa drew complete, 20. After the catalogue is a discussion of watermarks, two concordances, and an appendix that presents one letter to Cassiano and excerpts from lists relating to sculpture compiled by Cassiano.
The drawings are outstanding testimony to the interests and achievements of their commissioners who sent artists around the city of Rome to record antiquities. This moment in Baroque Rome was a high point for the collation and dissemination of ancient material cultural. This volume restores and continues this learned tradition. The authors consider each drawing as an object, identifying the hands and techniques of artists as well as the movement of the drawing through the centuries. They also reflect on the object history of the sculpture and provide succinct assessments, bibliographic references, and additional figures which highlight the cultural value of the Paper Museum. The result is an impeccable catalogue of the two-dimensional artwork and a clear presentation of the diachronic appreciation of the three-dimensional sources.
The 207 drawings represent 188 or 189 sculptures.[1] Several drawings give different views or interpretations of the same object. Other drawings show multiple objects; for example, 80-84 each show two to six objects, seemingly small terracotta statuettes, for a total of 15 objects in five drawings.
The detailed information about each drawing and object leaves the reader to reflect on the history of classical archaeology, the evolution of collections, and the role of a museum in safeguarding cultural heritage.This reminds us both of how important primary source research is in the study of the ancient world and of the greater proximity to the ancient world that 16th– and seventeenth-century scholars based in Rome had. That the figure of the Artemis of Ephesus attracted attention for its appearance is unsurprising; humanists in the sixteenth century had already recognized the subject (see 20 and 207) as Diana Ephesia from coins attests the long-established tradition and method in the field.
In several cases, seventeenth-century understanding revolves around the same points of interest as modern research, even vacillating in much the same way A statue of a gladiator illustrated at 6–7 was used by Nicholas Poussin, whom Cassiano patronized, as model for Scipio Africanus in a historical painting; the patron and artist clearly admired the unusual armor. In Doc 1 dated 31 July 1636, Nicolas de Peiresc expresses a desire for casts of the amulets on the sculpture of a large phallus, 72. For Cassiano and the Barberini owners, 3 was an empress holding ears of wheat and poppy. Dodero and Claridge present it as a marble statue of Juno.[2] In light of a statue excavated in Pozzuoli in the 1990s and the recognition of the similar Cesi statue as the one formerly at Syon House (both unnoted by Claridge and Dodero), I would prefer to describe this statue as Aphrodite or an empress as Aphrodite.[3] Yet, all these interpretations are shades of the same shared fundamental understanding: the portrayed held an exalted divine or semi-divine position.
Just as seventeenth-century perspectives influenced academic understanding, so too our modern perspectives create a new discussion. In case of 5, the “Hestia Giustiniani”, the seventeenth-century interest in the Vestal Virgins allowed them to see the plainly draped woman with her head covered as Hestia, the goddess of the hearth, the prototype of the Vestals. The catalogue entry here, taking a new approach, explores first the context of Rome, imagining one set of related peplos-wearing statues from the Horti Sallustiani and another set to which this Giustiniani and a now lost item belonged. It then duly comments on the almost three-centuries of scholarship that have emphasized the statue’s relationship to Greek sculpture of the early fifth-century. Yet it is clearly not interested in the Kopienkritik discussion, focusing on a smaller-scale bronze from the Villa of the Papyri which follows only the “flexible typology” rather than on two full-sized copies of the body, one from Ephesus and one from Rome, and the three copies of the head (one of which in Izmir has fascinating Late Antique eyes). [4]
The draped male torso with a socket for the insertion of a portrait head, 8 and 15, was drawn twice. Dodero and Claridge are unable to trace the object and thus, little can be said about its seventeenth-century significance. In this case, the modern authors, who associate it with images of soldiers and barbarians, might have tried a related typology; the cloak, the drapery patterns, the belt, and the sword are common to equestrian statues.[5]
The inability to trace the objects is important to note because it indirectly transmits past attitudes towards portable objects and directly demonstrates the value of the concept of the Paper Museum. Claridge and Dodero were unable to locate 90 of the 189 objects (48%). A quarter of the objects, 47, 25%, are still in Rome and at the Vatican. Thirteen percent of the objects, are now in Berlin and Florence (13 and 11, respectively). The remaining 14 % are in various European cities, Moscow, and New York. Four have gone missing relatively recently (16 from the Bardini collection in Florence, 126 and 188 from Berlin, and 102-104 from Castle Howard). Movement of antiquities from Rome to the rest of Europe began in the late seventeenth century and flourished thereafter, reflecting a widespread western-world interest in collecting archaeological statuary. Individuals who admired these objects for history and aesthetics curated them and gave them economic value.
Drawing 43 showing a statue of a priest/priestess of Cybele by Vincenzo Leonardi illustrates this cycle best. After the drawing was made in Rome in ca. 1640, the statue was taken to Marseilles and then to Paris where by 1719 it had lost its head. In ca. 1720, it was sold to Lord Pembroke for Wilton House and acquired a new head but by then the high-relief detail of its costume was damaged.[6] In 1961, the Capitoline Museum purchased it at auction and so it returned to Rome.
The drawing is especially valuable because it reproduces the lost head and ornament. Pietro da Cortona’s drawings 12-14 of a togatus provide another example of the documentary quality of the contributions. Annotated by dal Pozzo who comments on find location and costume, these drawings faithfully record the statue’s archaeological state. Comparative figure 12, a modern photograph of the object in the Palazzo Barberini, shows it transformed with a new head, arm, and feet.
The changes in the appearance of these objects, which was perfectly acceptable and even desirable, must explain several of the “untraced” objects. In the seventeenth century owners naturally commissioned competent artists to complete the missing portions of statues. The drawing of an Amazon, 1, and that of a togate statue of a Julio-Claudian boy, 18 provide excellent examples in which restorations and then purist removals make identification difficult and raise doubts about the accuracy of our knowledge.[7]
1, a drawing of the Amazon of the Sciarra type, 1, shows shield at the right leg and a helmet at the left leg. This shield seems a post-antique restoration because the ten full-size examples of this statue type found in the eighteenth century and later show that a tall pillar under the left arm supported the statue. Claridge and Dodero identify the sculpture as a statue in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, which arrived in Copenhagen 1897 without helmet or shield and which in 1978 lost other restorations. Two other statues of Amazons relate interestingly to the drawing. One, in the “Mattei” Amazon type, found on the Palatine in 1570, shows a similar shield and helmet by its feet. Another now in the Vatican from an early seventeenth-century collection also has a similar shield, so similar that previous scholars believed the drawing to represent it. Do the seventeenth-century drawings and restorers preserve elements of a specific set of Roman-period Amazons from the Palatine? Or were the restorers all influenced by the “Mattei” Amazon of 1570?
The drawing of the boy wearing a bulla, 18, also gives pause. Pietro Testa illustrates a boy whose portrait recalls a type identified as Britannicus.[8] There are two similar togate statues of this boy, both now in the Vatican collection. The statue on the Scala Simonetti (with a square plinth) was supposedly found at Castrum Novum (near Civitavecchia) in 1778 and a head from Rome was added in the following year.[9] The statue in Galleria dei Candelabri (on a round plinth) consists of a body to which supposedly was added the head of a young boy excavated in 1780 at Otriculum.[10] The Dal Pozzo drawing and the coincidence of a body found in 1778 and a head found in 1780 suggest an error in the records. Perhaps the 1778 Castrum Novum body and the 1780 Otriculum head were combined, forming the statue in the Galleria dei Candelabri? The Scala Simonetti statue, whose plinth better corresponds to the drawing, perhaps existed earlier and even formed a model for the eighteenth-century restoration.
Another untraced object, 59-60, is the hand of a boxer holding two weights. Claridge and Dodero correctly note the similarity to a hand now in the Museo del Teatro Romano in Verona, but because the Verona hand does not have weights, they are reluctant to associate the drawing and the object. Yet, the common practice of small adjustments, which depended on evolving tastes and even deterioration, makes it probable that the Verona hand is indeed that of the drawings.
These few examples demonstrate how this catalogue and the Paper Museum have successfully brought 189 ancient sculptures in their seventeenth-century state into the twenty-first century, providing new material for researchers to consider. In today’s world obsessed with documentation and holding back time, this is a significant achievement. Notably it is one whose basis is a physical object, a drawing, the artistic quality of which ensured its long life. This leaves me to wonder whether our digital scans stored in a cloud will have the same power to preserve.
Notes
[1] One drawing, 11, by a student of Pietro da Cortona, gives the profile of a woman wearing a scarf around her head in a way that appears in many seventeenth-century mythological paintings and is unlike ancient renditions, leading the authors to conclude that the drawing is a study for a female figure in the ancient manner rather than an ancient object.
[2] They recognize that the statue body is in Munich but fail to note that the head shown in the drawing was removed in the twentieth century and remains in the Munich collection. For the head, Munich Glypthotek, inv. no. Gl. 208A: Michela Fuchs, Glyptothek München, Katalog der Skulpturen. Vol. 4, Römische Idealplastik (Munich: Beck, 1992), 77–8, no. 11.
[3] Julia Lenaghan, “Assessing a Roman Copy: The story of the Syon Aphrodite,” American Journal of Archaeology 123.1 2019, 79-100.
[4] Renate Tolle-Kastenbein, “Fruhklassische Peplosfiguren. Typen und Repliken” Antike Plastik 20 1986, 33 for replicas. Late antique version of head in Izmir: arachne.dainst.org/entity/571846 and arachne.dainst.org/entity/571847. Tolle-Kastenbein argues for Hera. Evelyn Harrison postulated in her classes that it derived from a famous sculpture of the Zeus with his Argive bride Hera.
[5] For example, bronze Augustus from Athens, a fragmentary bronze from the Theater at Herculaneum, a torso from Lanuvium, and a statuette of a rider now in the Vatican: Johannes Bergemann, Römische Reiterstatuen. Ehrendenkmäler im öffentlichen Bereich, Beiträge zur Erschließung hellenistischer und kaiserzeitlicher Skulptur und Architektur 11 (Mainz 1990), cat nos. P 5, P 25.1, P54.
[6] Ian Jenkins, “The ‘Mutilated Priest’ of the Capitoline Museum and a Drawing from Cassiano dal Pozzo’s ‘Museo Cartaceo’,” The Burlington Magazine , Aug., 1989, Vol. 131, No. 1037 (Aug., 1989), 543- 549.
[7] See also no. 3 at footnotes 1 and 2 above.
[8] Dietrich Boschung, “Die Bildnistypen der iulisch-claudischen Kaiserfamilie: ein kritischer Forschungsbericht,” Journal of Roman Archaeology 6 1993, 74-75, Y Britannicus, Ya Typus Cuenca.
[9] arachne.dainst.org/entity/23156.
[10] Head of child of Julio-Claudian period from Otricoli mounted on a togate statue with bulla, Musei Vaticani, Galleria dei Candelabri inv. 2622: arachne.dainst.org/entity/1094201. D. Boschung, Gens Augusta: Untersuchungen zu Aufstellung, Wirkung and Bedeutung der Statuengruppen des julisch-claudischen Kaiserhauses (Mainz am Rhein: P. Von Zabern 2002), 68, no. 19.3, pl. 54.2