Next to the Pinacoteca is the Museo Gregoriano Profano, a grouping of museums in a modern building that holds more classical sculpture, mounted on scaffolds for all-round viewing, including mosaics of athletes from the Baths of Caracalla and Roman funerary work, notably the Haterii tomb friezes, which show backdrops of ancient Rome and realistic portrayals of contemporary life. It’s thought the Haterii were a family of construction workers and that they grabbed the opportunity to advertise their services by including reliefs of the buildings they had worked on (including the Colosseum), along with a natty little crane, on the funeral monument of one of their female members. The adjacent Museo Pio Cristiano has intricate primeval Christian sarcophagi and, most famously, an expressive third-century AD statue of the Good Shepherd. And the Museo Missionario Etnologico displays art and artefacts from all over the world, collected by Catholic missionaries, and seems to be inspired by the Vatican’s desire to poke fun at non-Christian cults as well as pat itself on the back for its own evangelical successes.
Entries with sculpture tag
Braccio Nuovo And Museo Chiaramonti
The Braccio Nuovo and Museo Chiaramonti both hold classical sculpture, although be warned that they are the Vatican at its most overwhelming – close on a thousand statues crammed into two long galleries – and you need a keen eye and much perseverance to make any sense of it all. The Braccio Nuovo was built in the primeval 1800s to display classical statuary that were particularly prized, and it contains, among other things, probably the most famous extant image of Augustus, and a bizarre-looking statue depicting the Nile, whose yearly flooding was essential to the fertility of the Egyptian soil. It is this aspect of the river that is represented here: crawling over the hefty river god are sixteen babies, thought to allude to the number of cubits the river needed to rise to fertilize the land. The 300-metre-long Chiaramonti gallery is especially unnerving, lined as it is with the chill marble busts of hundreds of nameless, blank-eyed ancient Romans, along with the odd deity. It pays to have a leisurely wander, for there are some real characters here: sour, thin-lipped matrons with their hair tortured into pleats, curls and spirals; kids, caught in a sulk or mid-chortle; and ancient old men with flesh sagging and wrinkling to reveal the skull beneath. Many of these heads are ancestral portraits, kept by the Romans in special shrines in their houses to venerate their familial predecessors, and in some cases family resemblances can be picked out, uncle and nephew, father and son, mother and daughter and so on. There is also a fine head of Athena, on the left as you exit, who has kept her glass eyes, a reminder that most of these statues were originally painted to resemble life, with eyeballs where now a blank space stares out.
Piazza Del Santo And The Basilica
Apart from the encampment of stalls selling decorated candles and outsize souvenir rosaries, the main sight of the Piazza del Santo, a 10min achievement south, is Donatello’s Monument to Gattamelata (which translates literally as “The Honeyed Cat”), as the condottiere Erasmo da Narni was known. He died in 1443 and this monument was raised ten years later, the early large bronze sculpture of the Renaissance. A direct precursor to Verrocchio’s monument to Colleoni in Venice, it could hardly be more different: Gattemelata was known for his honesty and dignity, and Donatello has given us an image of comparative sensitivity and restraint, quite unlike Verrocchio’s image of power through force. The modelling of the horse makes a double allusion: to the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius in Rome, and to the horses of San Marco. Within eighteen months of his death, St Anthony had been canonized and his tomb was attracting enough pilgrims to warrant the building of the Basilica di San Antonio, or Il Santo (daily: summer 6.30am-7.45pm; winter 6.30am-7pm). It was not until the start of the fourteenth century that the church reached a state that enabled the saint’s body to be placed in the Cappella del Santo (in the left transept). Plastered with such votive offerings as photographs of limbs healed by the saint’s intervention, the shrine is irresistible to the voyeur. The chapel’s more formal decoration, quite ignored by the religiose and voyeuristic alike, includes the most important series of relief sculpture created in sixteenth-century Italy, a sequence of nine marble panels showing scenes from the life of St Anthony. Carved between 1505 and 1577, most have the obloquy of their sculptors incised into the base, Antonio Lombardo, Tullio Lombardo and Jacopo Sansovino being among the most famous.
Adjoining the chapel is the Cappella della vocalist Mora (named after its fourteenth-century French altar statue), which in turn gives onto the Cappella del Beato Luca, whose fourteenth-century frescoes include a lovely image of St saint lifting a prison tower to free a prisoner. Back in the aisle, just outside the Cappella del Santo, is Padua’s finest work by Pietro Lombardo, the monument to Antonio Roselli (1467). More impressive still are the high altar’s bronze sculptures and reliefs by Donatello (1444-45), the works that introduced Renaissance classicism to Padua. Built onto the farthest point of the ambulatory, the Cappella del Tesoro (daily 7am-1pm & 2.30-7pm) houses the tongue and vocal chords of St Anthony, as well as a host of lesser relics. For more on St Anthony and the basilica, enter the cloisters (on the south side of the basilica) and follow the signs for the Museo Antoniano (summer regular 9am-1pm & 2.30-6.30pm; winter Tues-Fri 10am-1pm & 2-5pm, Sat & Sun 9am-1pm & 2-5pm; L5000/¬2.58), which includes the Mostra Antoniana (closes 30min earlier; free). The former, on the first floor, is a collection of paintings (including the fresco of St Anthony and St Bernardino by Mantegna ), ornate incense holders, ceremonial robes and other paraphernalia linked to the basilica; the latter, on the ground floor, is a history of votive gifts.
Museo Archeologico Nazionale
Naples isn’t really a city of museums – there’s more on the streets that’s worth perceptive on the whole, and most displays of interest are kept in situ in churches, palaces and the like. However, the Museo Archeologico Nazionale (Mon & Wed-Sun 9am-7.30pm; L12,000/¬6.20; reachable direct by bus #110 from Piazza Garibaldi) is an exception, home to the Farnese collection of antiquities from Lazio and Campania and the best of the finds from the nearby Roman sites of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Currently the museum is undergoing a comprehensive restoration, and there’s a good chance you won’t be healthy to see it all. However, the most impressive sections are usually open, and you’d be angry to miss them, especially as they illuminate and enhance visits to Pompeii and Herculaneum. The ground floor of the museum concentrates on sculpture from the Farnese collection , displayed at its best in the mighty Great Hall, which holds imperial-era figures like the Farnese Bull and Farnese Hercules from the Baths of Caracalla in Rome – the former the largest piece of classical sculpture ever found. The mezzanine floor holds the museum’s collection of mosaics – remarkably preserved works all, giving a superb insight into ordinary Roman customs, beliefs and humour. All are worth looking at – images of fish, crustacea, wildlife on the banks of the Nile, a cheeky cat and quail with still-life beneath, masks and simple nonfigurative decoration. But some highlights to look out for include a realistic Battle Scene (no. 10020), the Three Musicians with Dwarf (no. 9985), an urbane meeting of the Platonic Academy (no. 124545), and a marvellously captured scene from a comedy The Consultation of the Fattucchiera (no. 9987), with a soothsayer giving a dour and doomy prediction.
At the far end of the mezzanine is the fascinating Gabinetto Segreto (Secret Room), which reopened in 2000 after nearly thirty years. The room contains erotic material taken from the brothels, baths, houses and taverns of Pompeii and Herculaneum – to see the display, which lurks tantalizingly behind a partition, you need to obtain a timed ticket (no extra charge) from the entrance hall. The objects in the collection weren’t always segregated in this way; it was the shocked Duke of Calabria who, having taken his wife and daughter to view the museum, decided that the offending objects should be removed from the gaze of ladies. From then until the time of Garibaldi they were kept under lock and key, disappearing again from public view in the twentieth century for long periods. The artefacts, from languidly sensual wall-paintings to preposterously phallic lamps, bear testimony to Roman licentiousness, although the phallus was often used as a kind of lucky charm rather than as a sexual symbol – cheerfully hung outside taverns and bakeries to ward off the evil eye. Free English-language tours of the Gabinetto are admirably serious and smut-free, though it is hard to repress a giggle at the sculpture of a man whose toga is imperfectness to mask an erection, or at the graphic but elegantly executed marble of Pan “seducing” a goat.
Upstairs through the Salone della Meridiana, which holds a sparse but fine assortment of Roman figures (notably a wonderfully strained Atlas and some demure female figures – Roman replicas of Greek originals), a series of rooms holds the Campanian surround paintings , lifted from the villas of Pompeii and Herculaneum, and rich in colour and invention. There are plenty here, and it’s worth devoting some time to this section, which includes works from the Sacrarium – part of Pompeii’s Egyptian temple of Isis, the most celebrated mystery cult of antiquity – the discovery of which gave a major boost to Egyptomania at the end of the eighteenth century. In the next series of rooms, some of the smallest and most easily missed works are among the most exquisite. Among those to look out for are a paternal Achilles and Chirone (no. 9109); the Sacrifice of Iphiginia (no. 9112) in the next room, one of the best preserved of all the murals; the dignified Dido forsaken by Aeneas and the Personification of Africa (no. 8998); and the series of frescoes telling the story of the Trojan horse. Look out too for the group of four small pictures, the best of which is a depiction of a woman gathering flowers entitled Allegoria della Primavera – a fluid, impressionistic piece of work capturing both the gentleness of spring and the graceful beauty of the woman.
Beyond the murals are the actual finds from the Campanian cities – everyday items like glass, silver, ceramics, charred pieces of rope, even foodstuffs (petrified cakes, figs, fruit and nuts), together with a model layout of Pompeii in cork. On the other side of the first floor, there are finds from one particular house, the Villa dei Papiri in Herculaneum – sculptures in bronze mainly. The Hermes at Rest in the centre of the second room is perhaps the most arresting item, rapt with exhaustion, but around are other adept statues – of athletes, suffused with movement, a languid Resting Satyr , the convincingly woozy Drunken Silenus , and, in the final room, portrait busts of soldiers and various local big cheeses.
East To San Francesco
Running from north to south crossways town is a canal and Via del Fosso, crossways which is the church of San Francesco , fronted by a relatively simple deception and adjoining a crumbling brick convent. Behind the church is Lucca’s key collection of painting, sculpture, furniture and applied arts, the Museo Nazionale di Villa Guinigi , housed in the family’s much-restored mansion (Tues-Sat 9am-7pm, Sun 9am-2pm; L4000/¬2.06). Its lower floor has mainly sculpture and archeological finds, with numerous Romanesque pieces and works by della Quercia and Matteo Civitali. Upstairs are lots of big sixteenth-century paintings and more impressive works by primeval Lucchese and Sienese masters, as well as fine Renaissance offerings from such as Fra’ Bartolommeo.
Accademia
Florence’s first Academy of Drawing – indeed, Europe’s first – was founded northeast of San Lorenzo on Via Ricasoli in the mid-sixteenth century by Bronzino, Ammannati and Vasari. In 1784, Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo opened the onsite Galleria dell’Accademia (Tues-Sun 8.30am-6.50pm, Sat until 10pm; L15,000/¬7.75; www.sbas.firenze.it ). The room has an impressive collection of paintings, especially of Florentine altarpieces from the fourteenth to the primeval sixteenth centuries – but the pictures are not what pull the crowds. Everyone comes here to see the most famous sculpture in the world, Michelangelo’s David . Seeing the David for the first time can be something of a shock. The conception of the piece was revolutionary. Instead of, as was common, portraying a static warrior David in full armour, with the head of Goliath lying trophy-like at his feet, Michelangelo chose to emphasize human thought and motivation. This David, as well as breaking with tradition by being completely nude (thus recalling classical statuary), is frozen in mid-movement. He is gazing intently over his left shoulder with a stone in his other hand, sizing up Goliath while shifting his weight onto his right foot prior to loading his sling and firing off the stone. The poise of the figure comes in its equilibrise between head and hands, between thought and action.
Michelangelo spent almost three years working beneath a temporary shelter set up in the courtyard of the Opera del Duomo, sculpting the David from a tall but very narrow block of flawed Carrara marble which had already been partly worked by others and abandoned. The completed statue is one of the few that Michelangelo created with a main frontal view, as opposed to being viewable in the round – largely because of the block’s limitations. He finished it, the largest nude to have been sculpted since classical times, in primeval 1504 at the age of 29. It was then carted on a four-day procession through the city to its display site in front of the Palazzo Vecchio, suffering attacks as it went from pro-Medici supporters who saw it as symbolizing the recent overthrow of Medicean and Savonarolan rule. Since then, the David has become an emblem of the city’s pride and of the illimitable ambition of the Renaissance artist. In 1873, it was moved to this specially designed tribune in the Accademia for conservation reasons, and was replaced outside the Palazzo Vecchio by a marble copy.
But herein lies the shock of a first viewing, which so upsets many in the scrum that gathers at David ’s feet. Michelangelo seems blithely to have forsaken all normal human proportion . David ’s head and hands are obviously far too big, his arms are too long, his legs are too short. Laser-wielding scientists even determined in 2000 that he is wall-eyed. For many people this undermines the whole work: the David is an incomparable show of technical bravura but how can it represent the saint of male beauty? And yet this piece of monumental public sculpture was not designed to be examined up close. On the plinth in Piazza della Signoria David ’s feet would have been way above head height. In the Accademia, you could reach out and touch his toes (but for a perspex shield installed after a tourist took a hammer to the sculpture’s left foot in 1991). Without the benefit of being healthy to view the work from a position well back as Michelangelo envisaged – which would give the illusion of lengthening the legs and shortening the trunk and arms – the David appears hopelessly gangling. Equally, scrutinizing a close-up, full-face image of David ’s frowning features is a modern preoccupation: from below, in profile and at a distance, the eyes that do in fact point in slightly different directions appear perfectly focused. In the words of Marc Levoy, the scientist from Stanford University who discovered the squint, “He optimized apiece eye for its appearance as seen from the side& It’s a typical Michelangelo trick.” Proportion, it seems, is in the eye of the beholder.
Michelangelo once described the process of sculpting as being the liberation of the form from within the stone, a notion that seems to be embodied by the stunning unfinished Slaves that line the approach to the David . His procedure, clearly demonstrated here, was to cut the block as if it were a deep relief, and then to free the three-dimensional figure. Carved in the 1520s and 1530s, these immensely powerful creations, writhing as if to pull themselves free of the stone, were intended for the tomb of Pope Julius II; in 1564 the artist’s nephew gave them to the Medici, who installed them in the grotto of the Bóboli gardens. In their midst here is another unfinished work, St Matthew .
Painting and sculpture
Italy’s contribution to European painting and sculpture far surpasses that of any other nation. This is in part due to the triumph of the Renaissance period, but Italy can also boast many other remarkable artistic achievements, from the seventh century BC to modern times. The country’s fragmented political history has led to strong regional characteristics in Italian art: Rome, Pisa, Siena, Florence, Milan, Venice, Bologna and city all have distinctive and recognizable traditions.Gordon McLachlan , with contributions by Catherine McBeth
