The Sculpture Museum - Catalog - Page 16
I will tell of Dionysus, the son of glorious Semele, how he appeared on a jutting
headland by the short of the fruitless sea, seeming like a stripling in the first flush of
manhood: his rich, dark hair was waving about him […]
(Hymn to Dionysus, p. 429).
We encounter the same youthful appearance in Seneca’s lyrical description:
Let the people’s hymn sound with the praise of Bacchus. Bind your streaming locks with
the nodding ivy, and in your soft hands grasp the Nysaean thyrsus! Bright glory of the
sky, come hither to the prayers which thine own illustrious Thebes, O Bacchus, offers to
thee with suppliant hands. Hither turn with favour thy virginal face; with thy star-bright
countenance drive away the clouds, the grim threats of Erebus, and greedy fate. Thee
it becomes to circle thy locks with flowers of the springtime, thee to cover thy head with
Tyrian turban, or thy smooth brow to wreathe with the ivy’s clustering berries; now to
fling loose thy lawless-streaming locks, again to bind them in a knot close-drawn […]
(Seneca, Oedipus, lines 401ff.).
fig. 2 Roman, Bust of Capitoline
Dionysus, illustrated in J.J.
Winckelmann, Monumenti antichi
inediti, Rome, 1767, plate 55
Over the centuries, the ‘virginal face’ and ‘star-bright countenance’ have
puzzled scholars, who formerly identified the bust as that of a Bacchante, the
sea goddess Leucothea, or Ariadne. The bust certainly fascinated the German
art historian J.J. Winckelmann (1717–1768), who mentioned it in his writings on
various occasions, and included an engraving of it in his Monumenti antichi inediti
(fig. 2), where he identified it as Leucothea. In his monumental History of Ancient
Art (Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums), Winckelmann finds in the bust a ‘joy [that]
floats, like a soft breeze that scarcely stirs the leaves’, which he juxtaposes with the
representation of suffering in the Laocoön as modes of expression ‘in the beautiful
style’ that did not detract from ‘harmony and grandeur’ (Winckelmann 1881,
p. 138).
related literature
J.J. Winckelmann, Monumenti antichi inediti, Rome, 1767
J J. Winckelmann, The History of Ancient Art, vol. II, translated by G. Henry Lodge,
London, 1881
Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns and Homerica, translated by Hugh G. Evelyn-White, London
and New York, 1914
E. Dodero, ‘Winckelmann e le Sculture di Palazzo Nuovo: Una Selezione’, in Il Tesoro di
Antichità: Winckelmann e il Museo Capitolino nellal Roma del Settecento, eds. E. Dodero and
P. Presicce, Rome, 2017, pp. 333-–59
