Menelaus supporting the body of Patroclus
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Iliad
The Iliad is an epic poem in dactylic hexameters, traditionally attributed to Homer. Set during the Trojan War, the ten-year siege of the city of Troy by a coalition of Greek states, it tells of the battles and events during the weeks of a quarrel between King Agamemnon and the warrior Achilles...
, has had a complicated artistic and social history that illustrates the degree to which free improvisatory restorations were made to fragments of ancient Roman sculpture during the 16th and 17th centuries.
The nucleus of Roman sculpture that has been so imaginatively completed initially comprised the headless torsos of a man in armor supporting a heroically nude dying comrade; the group was made in the late 1st century CE, a Roman copy freely reproducing a Hellenistic Pergamene original of the mid-3rd century BCE. Another version of the composition, though so dismembered and battered that the relationship is scarcely recognizable at first glance, is the so-called "Pasquin", the most famous of the talking statues of Rome
Talking statues of Rome
The talking statues of Rome provided an outlet for a form of anonymous political expression in Rome. Criticisms in the form of poems or witticisms were posted on well-known statues in Rome...
. It was set up on a pedestal in 1501.
The sculpture now under the Loggia dei Lanzi
Loggia dei Lanzi
The Loggia dei Lanzi, also called the Loggia della Signoria, is a building on a corner of the Piazza della Signoria in Florence, Italy, adjoining the Uffizi Gallery. It consists of wide arches open to the street, three bays wide and one bay deep. The arches rest on clustered pilasters with...
in Piazza della Signoria
Piazza della Signoria
Piazza della Signoria is an L-shaped square in front of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, Italy. It was named after the Palazzo della Signoria, also called Palazzo Vecchio....
, Florence, (illustration, right) is one of two restored versions of this subject that passed into the hands of Cosimo I, Grand Duke of Tuscany. (The other is in a subsidiary courtyard of Palazzo Pitti
Palazzo Pitti
The Palazzo Pitti , in English sometimes called the Pitti Palace, is a vast mainly Renaissance palace in Florence, Italy. It is situated on the south side of the River Arno, a short distance from the Ponte Vecchio...
. Its history is briefly summarised below.)
The illustrated sculpture was purchased by Cosimo I, not long before 1570, soon after it was discovered in the vigna of Antonio Velli, half a Roman mile beyond Porta Portese
Porta Portese
Porta Portese is a gate in Rome, Italy.The gate was built in 1644 as part of the Janiculum Walls commissioned by Pope Urban VIII, replacing the Porta Portuensis. Until the late 19th century, the Ripa Grande port was located in the nearby...
, Rome. With the consent of Pope Pius V
Pope Pius V
Pope Saint Pius V , born Antonio Ghislieri , was Pope from 1566 to 1572 and is a saint of the Catholic Church. He is chiefly notable for his role in the Council of Trent, the Counter-Reformation, and the standardization of the Roman liturgy within the Latin Church...
it was taken immediately to Florence, where it appears in the inventory taken at Cosimo's death in 1574. The project for completing the truncated torso of the "Menelaus" figure, missing above the waist when it was found, according to the Memorie (1594) of the sculptor and antiquarian Flaminio Vacca
Flaminio Vacca
Flaminio Vacca or Vacchi was an Italian sculptor. His sculptural work can be seen in Rome in the grandiose funeral chapel of Pope Pius V designed by Domenico Fontana at the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore , in the Church of the Gesù and in the right transept of...
, was commissioned by Ferdinando II
Ferdinando II de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany
Ferdinando II de' Medici was grand duke of Tuscany from 1621 to 1670. He was the eldest child of Cosimo II de' Medici and Maria Maddalena of Austria. His 49 year rule was punctuated by the terminations of the remaining operations of the Medici Bank, and the beginning of Tuscany's long economic...
; the restoration was worked out by Pietro Tacca
Pietro Tacca
Pietro Tacca was an Italian sculptor, who was the chief pupil and follower of Giambologna. Tacca began in a Mannerist style and worked in the Baroque style during his maturity.-Biography:...
and executed by Lodovico Salvetti from Tacca's model, according to Filippo Baldinucci
Filippo Baldinucci
Filippo Baldinucci was an Italian art historian and biographer.-Life:Baldinucci is considered among the most significant Florentine biographers/historians of the artists and the arts of the Baroque period...
. It was set up in a niche on the south end of the Ponte Vecchio
Ponte Vecchio
The Ponte Vecchio is a Medieval stone closed-spandrel segmental arch bridge over the Arno River, in Florence, Italy, noted for still having shops built along it, as was once common. Butchers initially occupied the shops; the present tenants are jewellers, art dealers and souvenir sellers...
. Paolo Alessandro Maffei
Paolo Alessandro Maffei
Paolo Alessandro Maffei was an antiquarian with a humanist education, who was active in Rome. Maffei was the son of Paolo Maffei and his wife Giovanna di Raffaele, both of patrician families of Volterra...
's engraving of 1704 shows that Menelaus then was wearing a helmet much simpler than the elaborate neoclassical one provided by Ricci seen on the sculpture today.
In 1771 the neoclassic artist Anton Raphael Mengs
Anton Raphael Mengs
Anton Raphael Mengs was a German painter, active in Rome, Madrid and Saxony, who became one of the precursors to Neoclassical painting.- Biography :Mengs was born in 1728 at Ústí nad Labem in Bohemia...
took moulds of the parts he considered antique of this sculpture and the version at the Palazzo Pitti (discussed below) and reassembled them in a plaster model that was intended to be more faithful to the Roman original. It was taken away to be further repaired in 1798 and remained in obscurity, undergoing further adjustments by Stefano Ricci in the 1830s, until it was finally re-erected in 1838, in the Loggia dei Lanzi. The feature which still draws most attention is the lifeless hanging left arm of Patroclus, seemingly dislocated, which was in fact part of the Tacca-Salvetti restoration. Other "errors" an archaeologist today would point out, by comparing the fragment with other surviving fragments rather than by relying on his sensitive artistic eye, are the lifted left leg of the bearer and raised right knee of Patroclus, and the picturesquely mounded ground that serves as a base.
The second Medici group
The second group of Menelaus supporting the body of Patroclus (not illustrated) was a gift in 1570 from the Florentine Paolo Antonio SoderiniPaolo Antonio Soderini
Paolo Antonio Soderini was a noble Florentine jurist active in the anti-Medicean Florentine republic, who spent some years resident at Rome....
of Rome. It was said to have been found at the Mausoleum of Augustus
Mausoleum of Augustus
The Mausoleum of Augustus is a large tomb built by the Roman Emperor Augustus in 28 BC on the Campus Martius in Rome, Italy. The Mausoleum, now located on the Piazza Augusto Imperatore, is no longer open to tourists, and the ravages of time and carelessness have stripped the ruins bare...
. Identified as Ajax, is stands in the Cortile del Ajaco of Palazzo Pitti
Palazzo Pitti
The Palazzo Pitti , in English sometimes called the Pitti Palace, is a vast mainly Renaissance palace in Florence, Italy. It is situated on the south side of the River Arno, a short distance from the Ponte Vecchio...
.
Further fragments of other Roman copies of this group have appeared during the 20th century, but more severe modern criteria have prevented any of them from being restored as a completed figural group.