Athena Giustiniani
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The Parian marble Athena Giustiniani or Giustiniani Minerva is an Antonine Roman marble copy of a Greek sculpture of Pallas Athena, of the late fifth-early fourth century BCE.[1] It was discovered in the early seventeenth century,[2], reputedly in the ruins of a ten-sided nymphaeum on the Esquiline Hill which thus gained the misnomer the "Temple of Minerva Medica" (Platner 1929).[3] Pietro Santi Bartoli, in the seventeenth century, gave an alternative discovery site, in the Orto di Minerva adjacent to the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, which, as everyone knew, had been built over a temple of Minerva (dedicated by Pompey the Great in 62 BCE).[4] Purely as a measure of the respect for its quality, it was reputed, well into the nineteenth century, to be a copy of a statue by Pheidias.
It receives its name from having been in the collection of Vincenzo Giustiniani, who in the beginning of the seventeenth century built the Roman Palazzo Giustiniani and formed the art collection luxuriously engraved and published as the Galleria Giustiniana, Rome, 1631. Apparently the sculpture was never copied during the time it was in the Giustiniani collection: Winckelmann never mentioned it, though the austere classical style it exhibits was first isolated and described by him.
The sculpture has often been credited with the quality of a cult image (Haskell and Penny 1981:270) rather than a decorative trophy. The serpent at Athena's right foot recalls the archaic myth of Erichthonius in his serpent form. The forearms are restorations, as is the spear, needless to say, and the sphinx upon the goddess's Corinthian helmet.
The Minerva Giustiniani as it was called, escaped the fate of the rest of the Giustiniani collection; under Napoleonic occupation, the collection was removed in 1807 to Paris, where it was to some extent broken up. In 1815 all that remained of it, in particular about 170 pictures, was purchased by Frederick William III of Prussia and removed to Berlin, where it formed a portion of the royal museum.
The Minerva however had been bought by Lucien Bonaparte in 1805, and was installed in the grand hall of his Roman residence, the Palazzo Nunez. In 1817 he sold it to Pope Pius VII who was commissioning the Braccio Nuovo of the Vatican Museums. When the Braccio Nuovo was opened in 1822, the sculpture was installed as it is today.
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[edit] See also
- Athena of Velletri, a closely similar type.
[edit] Notes
- ^ Helbig 1963:343-4. Height 2.25 m.
- ^ It makes its first appearance as the first piece of sculpture engraved in the Galleria Giustiniani, 1631, vol. I, pl. 3.
- ^ The actual Temple of Minerva Medica, known from ancient references, has not been securely identified. (Platner 1929)
- ^ Haskell and Penny (1981:269) find that "both locations seem suspiciously appropriate, and the latter may have been suggested by the connection between the snake and Aesculapius, the god of Medicine".
[edit] References
- Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, 1981. Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Antique Sculpture, 1500-1900 (Yale University Press), cat. no. 63.
- Wolfgang Helbig, Führer durch die öffenlicher Sammlungen klassischer Altertümer in Rom, rev. ed 1963-72.
- Samuel Ball Platner and Thomas Ashby, 1929. A Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome (on-line exerpt)
