Hermes (Museo Pio-Clementino)

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. [This was recognized before Winckelmann ("History of the Art of Antiquity", II), but the identification as Hermes was not proposed before Ennio Quirino Visconti in his 1818 catalogue of the museum. J. J. Pollitt, “Masters and masterworks”, in O. Palagia and J. J. Pollitt, "Personal Styles in Greek Sculpture", Cambridge University Press, p.8.] 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". [Brummer 1970:212, quoted in Haskell and Penny 1981:141.] The most likely site for its discovery is in a garden near Castel Sant'Angelo, [The Castel Sant'Angelo had been built as Hadrian's mausoleum.] 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 and 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 [Wolfgang Helbig, "Führer durch die öffentlicher Sammlungen klassischer Altertümer in Rom" 4th ed. (Tün) 1963-72).] ) to be a Hadrianic copy (early second century CE) of a bronze by Praxiteles or one of his school.

Notes

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.

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