Furietti Centaurs

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The Old Centaur (Capitoline Museum)		The Young Centaur

The Furietti Centaurs (known as the Old Centaur and Young Centaur, or Older Centaur and Younger Centaur, when being treated separately) are a pair of Hellenistic grey-black marble sculptures of centaurs. One is an old, bearded centaur, with a pained expression, and the other is a young smiling centaur with his arm raised.

1 Capitoline Centaurs
2 Louvre
3 Reception
4 External links

[edit] Capitoline Centaurs

The sculptures were found together at Hadrian's Villa in Tivoli by Monsignor Giuseppe Alessandro Furietti in December 1736; they were the outstanding pieces of his collection of antiquities, which he refused to give to Pope Benedict XIV at the cost of a cardinal's hat. Furietti was eventually created cardinal priest, by Pope Clement XIII in the consistory of 24 September 1759. After his death, his heirs sold the centaurs and the famous Furietti mosaic of four drinking doves for 14,000 scuidi, and they have been in the Capitoline collection ever since.

Both statues bear the signature of Aristeas and Papias of Aphrodisias, a city in Asia Minor - either the sculptures were produced there, or the artists had come to Rome. They were copied in the 1st–2nd centuries AD by these sculptors from 2nd century BC Hellenistic originals.

[edit] Louvre

The Old Centaur (Louvre)

Another copy of the same type as the Old Centaur, this time in white marble, was excavated in Rome in the 17th century (having lost its probable Young Centaur pair). It entered the Borghese collection, but was acquired from it by Napoleon in 1807 and is now in the Louvre Museum. It has a Cupid on the centaur's back, teasing him, which has not survived on the Capitoline example, though the Eros's arm and foot and the centaur's left arm on this example are restorations, and the base and the support beneath the centaur are modern additions.

[edit] Reception

The pair were popular in the 18th century, as illustrators of centaurs posed them as civilized patrons of hospitality and learning (like Chiron) rather than bestial half-animals (as at the Battle of the Centaurs), and casts of them were collected across Europe - for example, the pair at the Royal Academy, one at either side of the foot of their main staircase, which are there to this day (in what is now the Courtauld Institute gallery; or those bought by Joseph Nollekens from Bartolomeo Cavaceppi that may still be seen at Shugborough Hall, Staffordshire. Full-sized marble copies were also produced in large numbers - Cavaceppi produced them, and Pietro Della Valle sculpted one in Rome for the count Grimod d'Orsay - he intended it to be placed on a fountain in the Museum Courtyard in 1795, but it was in fact placed at Saint-Cloud in July 1802 (it was later brought to Versailles on 23 March 1872, and on 24 September 1924 moved into the Grand Trianon garden there[1]).