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Friday, July 6, 2012

Antino -- Villa Albani, Roma

Speranza


Antinoo con il cavallo - Villa Albani

Villa Albani, Rome.

Relief depicting “Antinous with the horse” (Antinoo con il cavallo). Exhibited in the Grand Gallery of the Villa Albani-Torlonia. For the ceiling of this gallery Anton Raphael Mengs painted in 1761 his famous fresco: il Parnaso (Parnassus), an importan early Neo-classical work.
Photography taken c.1860 by James Anderson (1813-1877), a British photographer working mainly in Rome.

Born Isaac Atkinson, he went to Paris as a young man to study painting, and in 1838 he went to Rome, where he adopted the names William Nugent Dunbar and later James Anderson, and where he participated in the annual exhibition of the “Società degli Amatori e Cultori delle Belle Arti". By 1849 he was established as a photographer of ancient Greek and Roman sculpture and views of Rome, all for the tourist market. In 1859 he published his first album of photographic prints. Later he turned more exclusively to reproducing famous works of art.

The business was continued into the 20th century by his eldest son, Domenico Anderson, and into the 1950s by the third generation of the family. In the 1960s Anderson’s prints and negatives became part of the great art-historical archive in Florence.
This Roman marble relief in the Villa Albani, of unknown provenance, was restored arbitrarily towards the middle of the 18th century with a head of Antinous. It depicts Antinous, holding a horse, as one of the Dioscuri (sons of Zeus) or Castores (Castor and Pollux), the twin brothers that were excellent horsemen and hunters.
Francisco de la Maza (1966): «La cabeza, por cierto, es magnífica. Las mejillas, los ojos, las cejas son impecables. Los cabellos sobre la frente, el rostro y la nuca son exelentes», (The head, by the way, is superb. The cheeks , the eyes, the eyebrows are impecable. The curls over the forehead, face and nape of the neck are excellent).
Anderson’s photography is one of the few of this relief in the Villa Albani (now Torlonia).
Alessandro Albani (1692-1779) was an Italian aristocrat and cardinal, and a collector and patron of the arts. He is famous as the commissioner of the Villa Albani in Romes via Salaria, completed in 1763, to house his evolving, constantly changing, sold, replaced and continually renewed series of collections of antiquities and Roman sculpture. Albani's life-long friend Carlo Marchionni (1702-1786) was the architect in charge, at the Villa. The Albani antiquities were catalogued by the Cardinal's secretary, the first professional art historian, Johann Joachim Winckelmann.
The last member of the Albani family, marchioness Antonietta Lita Albani (1814-1855), married prince Carlo Castelbarco-Visconti-Simonetta (1808-1880), who obtained the Villa Albani as dowry.
In 1852, the villa passed to the Chigi family, who finally, in 1866, sold it to Alessandro Raffaele Torlonia (1800-1886), prince of Civitella Cesi.
The Torlonia family still ownes the famous villa, now known as the Villa Albani-Torlonia nella via Salaria.
This relief is kept in the “Galleria VI”, the monumental central gallery of the Villa Albani-Torlonia, with a ceiling decorated with the famous fresco “Il Parnaso” (Parnassus) painted in 1761 by Anton Raphael Mengs, a work that created a sensation and helped establish the ascendancy of Neoclassical painting.
Stefano Antonio Morcelli, Carlo Fèa, and Pietro Ercole Visconti, in their work: “La villa Albani descritta”, published in Rome in 1869, we read about this relief:
Nº 1013. ANTINOO, bassorilievo in figura minore del vero, marmo Greco. Fra le adulazioni alle quail fu oggetto il favorite di Adriano, v’ebbe ancor quella di rappresentarlo con gli attribute delle diverse divinità. Nel presente bassorilievo è figurato esso como uno dei Castori ; ha quindi presso il cavallo, che tiene con la destra pel morso. Il tempio rappresentato nel fondo ne ricorda gli onori divini.

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