Hermes (Museo Pio-Clementino)
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The Hermes of the Museo Pio-Clementino, part of the Vatican collections, Rome, was long admired as the Belvedere Antinous, named from its prominent placement in the Cortile del Belvedere. 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.
The sculpture was bought for the Farnese 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".[2] The most likely site for its discovery is in a garden near Castel Sant'Angelo,[3] where the Palis had property.
The statue was immediately famous, as the Antinous Admirandus, 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, Versailles in the seventeenth century. Reduced versions of the head in plaster are still to be seen on many a library bookcase.
Today the sculpture is considered (in the most recent Helbig) to be a Hadrianic copy of a bronze by Praxiteles or one of his school.
[edit] Notes
[edit] References
- Brummer, Hans Henrik, 1970. The Statue Court in the Vatican Belvedere (Stockholm).
- Haskell, Francis, and Nicholas Penny, 1981. Taste and the Antique: the Lure of Classical Sculpture 1500-1900 (Yale University Press), cat. no. 4, pp 141-43.
- Helbig, Wolfgang, 1963-72. Führer durch die öffentlichen Sammlungen der klassistischer Altertümer in Rom, (Tubingen) 4th ed., I, pp 190-91.
