D'APRES L'ANTIQUE. 515pp. Paris: Seuil / Reunion de Musees Nationaux. 390fr. - 2 7118 4040 9
MY LAOCOON. Alternative claims in the interpretation of artworks. By Richard Brilliant. 162pp. University of California Press; distributed in the UK by Wiley. Pounds 28.50. TLS Pounds 27.50. - 0 520 21682 2
LAOCOONTE. Fama e stile. By Salvatore Settis, 258pp. Rome: Donzelli. L45,000. -
88 7989 501 X
The restoration and reinvention of classical sculpture
A famous drawing by J. H. Fuseli shows an artist, "overwhelmed", as the title has it, "by the grandeur of ancient ruins", sitting and weeping next to a colossal Roman sculpted foot (in fact, a foot - now in the Conservatori museum in Rome - that once belonged to a statue of the Emperor Constantine). Fuseli's point is not just that ancient art can still drive a man of sensibility to tears. He is also, rightly, emphasizing that most of the masterpieces of Greek and Roman sculpture rediscovered since the Renaissance emerged from the ground in a sadly ruined state: headless corpses, dismembered torsos, tragically amputated limbs. His artist is weeping for what has been lost, as much as he is overwhelmed by antiquity's continuing grandeur.
The fact that so much classical sculpture on show in the major museums of the world is, none the less, in apparently pristine condition is largely due to the efforts of Fuseli's colleagues and predecessors, from Michelangelo to Thorvaldsen. As soon as a ruined masterpiece was unearthed in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Rome, the leading sculptors of the day would instantly be on the scene. A series of well-rehearsed refusals to tamper with the surviving fragments of antique genius was usually their first reaction. But such scruples did not stand in their way for long; for these artists were soon busy equipping the new discovery with all the things it needed (from - literally - heads to toes) to make it look the part, as a perfect classical statue should. There are few exceptions to the general rule that any ancient sculpture apparently still endowed with its unbroken outstretched fingers (or raised arm, or, in most cases, nose) has actually been the beneficiary of some such modern makeover.
Unsurprisingly, given the artists involved, some of these interventions have become highlights of the popular repertoire of classical sculpture. It was, for example, the addition of Bernini's luscious mattress that elevated the awkward "Hermaphrodite" in the Louvre to stardom. And Bernini again gave us the winning face of Eros, who peeps out from behind the legs of the sullen Ludovisi "Ares" (a sneaking reminder of the god of war's adultery with Eros' mother, Aphrodite). In other cases, an attractive Renaissance restoration provided a serious rival to the later serendipitous - often, it must be admitted, suspiciously serendipitous - discovery of a statue's missing part. When, some years after the recovery of the bulk of the sculpture, the "original" legs of the Farnese "Hercules" were said to have turned up, most people still preferred the ones that Michelangelo's pupil, Guglielmo della Porta, had designed. It was a long time before those Renaissance additions were removed to make way for the "originals" - and, even then, della Porta's versions continued to be displayed next to the statue itself (as they are, once more, in the Naples museum today).
Recent scholarship has taken these restorations very seriously. Despite a few fits of purism in the twentieth century (such as the notorious stripping of Thorvaldsen's elegant neoclassical restorations from the most famous group of Greek sculpture in the Munich Glyptothek, or the Louvre's decision to remove their "Dying Seneca" from his gory red, Renaissance bath and stand him on a concrete block), art historians and museum curators have generally come to see the interventions of Bernini and his like as an important part of the ongoing, creative history of classical sculpture; not accurate maybe, but well worth studying in their own right.
