Speranza
The Meleager of
Skopas is a lost bronze sculpture of the Greek hero Meleager – host of the
Calydonian boar hunt – that is associated in modern times with the fourth
century BCE architect and sculptor Skopas of Paros.
The statue escaped
mention in any classical writer.
It is judged to have been a late work in the
sculptor's career, but it is known only through a number of copies that vary
in quality and in fidelity to the original, which show it to have been one of
the famous sculptures of Antiquity: "the popularity of the Meleager during Roman
times was certainly great," notes Brunilde Sismondo Ridgway, who reports
Andrew F. Stewart's count of 13 statues, 4 torsos, 19 heads (which are similar
enough to the Ludovisi Ares to raise confusions) busts and herms, a variant with
changed stance and attributes, and 11 versions adapted for a portrait or a
deity.
Six or seven of the accepted copies are accompanied by a dog, 12 wear a
chlamys, 3, clinching the sculptural type's identification with Meleager, are
accompanied by a boar's head trophy, as in the Vatican Meleager (illustration,
right). Ms Ridgeway accounts for the sculpture's popularity in part "by the
appeal that hunting figures had for the Romans, through theirheroizing
connotations."[5]
A
torso in the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University,[7] is rated among the superior
copies, if it is indeed a Meleager.[8] "There are other marble Meleagers," wrote
Cornelius Vermeule in 1967,[9] "one or two reaching the level of the Fogg
statue[10] but most of them documents of stonecutting devoid of the restless
inner life that must have been imparted by the master to the original." Several
unfinished copies found in Athens suggest that the city was a center for
reproductions for the Roman market.[11]
It is not known whether Skopas'
original was carried out for the heroon at Calydon where Meleager was venerated
and whether the original was carried off as a cultural trophy by one of the
Romans "of taste and means".[12]
The life-size standing "Meleagro" from Palazzo
Fusconi-Pighini, sometimes identified in the 16th and 17th
centuries as an Adonis, who was a victim of a boar rather than its master, was
recorded in 1546 among the most beautiful in Rome, not excluding the antiquities
of the Cortile del Belvedere.
The "Meleagro" was in the house of the doctor to three popes,
Francesco Fusconi from Norcia, whose Roman palazzo faced Palazzo Farnese.
"Meleagro", which was engraved in all the anthologies of antiquities, was
copied by Pierre Lepautre for Louis XIV at Marly.
The original remained with
Fusconi's eventual Pighini heirs until early in 1770, when it was purchased by
Pope Clement XIV as one of the founding pieces for his new museum in the
Vatican.
It was among the select group of sculptures triumphantly removed by
Napoleon to Paris, under terms of the Treaty of Tolentino (1797) but returned
after Napoleon's fall.
A variant, discovered in 1838, has been conserved in
the Antikensammlung Berlin[14] since 1844. Another early Roman full-size marble
copy is at the Art Institute of Chicago.[15]
Ms Ridgeway remarks critically
on the slenderness of the connection with Skopas, which is based on the subject
of the east pediment of the Temple of Athena Alea at Tegea, in which Skopas was
the architect, but not, as Ms Ridgeway observes, accounted directly responsible
for the pediment sculptures in any classical reference: "from a a narrative
pedimental composition in Arkadia— related, moreover, to local families and
legends— to a single free-standing sculpture, perhaps in Kalydon (a tomb
monument to the hero, as suggested by Stewart?) is quite a leap of the
imagination."[16]
Notes
^ Inv. 490
^ Andrew F. Stewart, Skopas
of Paros (1977) ch. 9, places it with his Pothos; Stewart's monograph, the
modern standard, had its origins in his thesis.
^ Stewart 1977 Appendix 4
lists known copies and fragments.
^ Ridgway, Hellenistic Sculpture I: Styles
Of Ca. 331-200 B.C. (University of Wisconsin Press) 2001:87f.
^ Ridgeway
2001:88.
^ GR 1906.1-17.1; the bust is modern, made to support the ancient
head, a Roman copy after Skopas
^ Bequest of Mrs K.G.T. Webster, acc. no.
1926.48; the sculpture is actually conserved in the Sackler Museum
^ Stewart
1977:104ff raised the possibility that the Fogg torso instead represented a copy
of one of two types of Skopas' Aesculapius, noticed by Pausanias in the second
century CE, and Brunilde Sismondo Ridgway (2001:88) noticed the remains of a
staff under the left armpit, where the spear associated with representations of
Meleager would pierce the youth's skin or else be dulled against the ground, she
remarked.
^ Vermeule, "Greek Sculpture and Roman Taste", Boston Museum
Bulletin 65 No. 342 (1967:175-192) p. 175
^ Vermeule illustrates (fig. 2) a
battered mirror-image head of the Meleager, also at the Fogg, of poorer
quality.
^ Vermeule 1967:175 note 3.
^ Vermeule 1967:175
---
Francis
Haskell and Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique: the lure of classical
sculpture, 1500-1900 (Yale University Press) 1982:263, cat. no. 60.
^
Illustration
^ Acc. no. 1972.935, height 173 cm (68-5/16 in.) gift of Mr. and
Mrs. Eugene A. Davidson.
^ Ridgeway 2001:89.
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Categories:
Roman copies of 4th-century BC Greek sculptures
Classical
Greece
A Roman first century CE marble Meleager with chlamys, a free improvisation on Skopas's model, from the Fusconi-Pighini collection (Museo Pio-Clementino, Rome.
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