Antiquities Exhibits

Among the most poignant sculptures at the Loggia dei Lanzi (and my favorite) is the ancient Flavian era (1st century CE) Pasquino Group (also known as "Menelaus Carrying the Body of Patroclus" or "Ajax Carrying the Body of Achilles"), a group of marble sculptures that copy a Hellenistic bronze original, dating to ca. 200–150 BCE.    During the 16th century, various authors proposed different identifications for the dead figure, including Hercules, Geryon, and Alexander the Great. Bernhard Schweitzer's 1936 "Das Original der sogennanten Pasquino-Gruppe" identifies the subject of the group as Menelaus carrying the body of Patroclus, However, this identification has been questioned and the identification of Ajax carrying the body of Achilles is now widely accepted for most of the known 15 Roman copies.  However, five fragments of a Pasquino group were excavated from Hadrian's Villa by Gavin Hamilton in 1769. This sculpture was a part of the Roman emp...

Yesterday, I featured the beautiful sculpture, "Kidnapping of the Sabine Women" by Giambologna displayed at the Loggia Dei Lanzi in Florence, Italy. Another spectacular work of Giambologna displayed there as well portrays the battle between Heracles and the centaur Nessus. Nessus was a famous centaur who carried off Deianeira, the wife of Heracles, and tried to force himself on her.  Heracles saw him from across the river and shot a Hydra-poisoned arrow into Nessus's breast. As he lay dying, in a final act of malice, Nessus told Deianeira that his blood would ensure that Heracles would be true to her forever, knowing the blood to be infected with the hydra's poison.  Sometime later, Deianeira's trust in Heracles began to wane because of his unrequited love for Iole, the daughter of King Eurytus of Oechalia. Heracles had been forbidden to marry Iole because her father, the king, feared she would meet the same fate as Heracles' first wife, Megara, who, alon...

The ancient legend of the abduction of the Sabine women by the men of Rome has inspired artists for centuries. Upon finding the city bereft of women, Rome’s founder, Romulus, invited the neighboring peoples to a festival as a pretense to the abduction. Each Roman youth carried off an unmarried woman from the Sabine contingent as his bride. When the Sabines later attacked Rome to reclaim their females, the women ran onto the battlefield and secured peace between their fathers and husbands. Here we see two dramatic treatments of the subject by Italian artists Andrea Andreani and Giambologna.  Andreani, an Italian engraver, revived the technique of the chiaroscuro print, the use of light and shadow to define three-dimensional objects, at the end of the sixteenth century and created a number of ambitious works including a reproduction of Andrea Mantegna's "Triumph of Caesar".  Some evidence exists that ancient Greek and Roman artists used chiaroscuro effects but the techni...