- Seated Hermes
The bronze "Seated Hermes", found at the
Villa of the Papyri inHerculaneum in 1758, is at theNational Archaeological Museum of Naples . [NM 5625.] "This statue was probably the most celebrated work of art discovered at Herculaneum andPompeii in the eighteenth century", Haskell and Penny have observed, ["Taste and the Antique: the Lure of Classical Sculpture 1500-1900", 1981, p. 267] once four large engravings reproducing it had appeared in "Le Antichità di Ercolano", 1771. [Volume VI, 1771, pp. 113-22.] 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 toPalermo in 1798. It was once again in the royal villa atPortici 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.Notes
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)
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