Seated Hermes

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Bronze Seated Hermes from Herculaneum
Bronze Seated Hermes from Herculaneum

The bronze Seated Hermes, found at the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum in 1758, is at the National Archaeological Museum of Naples.[1] "This statue was probably the most celebrated work of art discovered at Herculaneum and Pompeii in the eighteenth century", Haskell and Penny have observed,[2] once four large engravings reproducing it had appeared in Le Antichità di Ercolano, 1771.[3] To protect it from Napoleonic depredations, it was packed into one of the fifty-two cases of antiquities and works of art that accompanied the Bourbon flight to Palermo in 1798. It was once again in the royal villa at Portici in 1816 (Haskell and Penny 1981:269).

Robertson (1975, vol I:474) classifies it as a Roman copy, made before CE 79, needless to say, of a Greek bronze original of the late fourth or early third century BCE, in the tradition of Lysippos, whose name has been invoked in connection with the sculpture since its first reappearance.

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ NM 5625.
  2. ^ Taste and the Antique: the Lure of Classical Sculpture 1500-1900, 1981, p. 267
  3. ^ Volume VI, 1771, pp. 113-22.

[edit] References

  • Haskell, Francis, and Nicholas Penny, 1981. Taste and the Antique: the Lure of Classical Sculpture 1500-1900 (Yale University Press), cat. no. 62, pp 267-269.
  • Mattusch, Carol C. 2005. The Villa dei Papiri at Herculaneum. Life and Afterlife of a Sculpture Collection. (Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum), esp. chapter 5 and pp. 88-89, 216-222, and fig. 2.43.
  • Robertson, Martin, 1975. A History of Greek Art (Cambridge University Press)