The Sculpture Museum - Catalog - Page 88
italian, 19th century
20
Apollo and the Graces
After the Antique
Bronze
42.3 cm (16½ in.) high
68.2 cm (26¾ in.) wide
fig. 1
Roman, 1st century ad,
Apollo and the Graces, marble, 45 cm high
Naples, Museo Archeologico Nazionale,
inv. no.6688
This work is a version of the ancient relief depicting Apollo and the Three
Graces in the Museo Nazionale di Napoli (fig. 1). The antique original was first
recorded in the inventory of Cardinal Odoardo Farnese’s Roman palaces around
1642 as “un basso rilievo con quattro figure due in un letto, et Apollo senza
testa, et un’altra femina fuori di letto”. An intriguing object, the Farnese marble
appears in a drawing by Pietro Testa (1611–1650) for Cassiano dal Pozzo’s famous
Museo Cartaceo, acquired in 1762 by King George III (though not in its entirety)
for his library at Buckingham House. Consisting of more than seven thousand
watercolours, drawings and prints, the Museo documents subjects as wide ranging
as ancient art, archaeology, botany, geology, ornithology and zoology. As scholars
have pointed out, dal Pozzo’s choice of antiquities for the Museo was driven by
an interest in the original and unexplored, criteria to which the Neapolitan relief
evidently responded, since it was singled out of the immensely rich Farnese
collection together with only twenty-five other items.
At the end of the eighteenth century – when Ferdinand IV of Bourbon
inherited the Farnese treasures and ordered their transferral to the seat of his
kingdom – the marble plaque must have arrived in Naples, where it would have
been housed in the newly opened Real Museo Borbonico. Here, alongside other
marvels such as artefacts excavated in Pompeii, the relief would have been admired
by local and foreign visitors and artists alike, as testified by the present bronze, cast
in Italy for a Grand Tour audience. Another intriguing testimony to the ancient
marble’s appeal is a drawing of it attributed to the celebrated sculptor Bertel
Thorvaldsen, now in the Thorvaldsen Museum in Copenhagen (inv. no. C832). In
1797, the artist had spent a month in Naples precisely to study the city’s antiquities,
before going on to Rome to complete his training.
