RAPACIOUS ROMAN COLLECTORS
Some collectors’ hobbies--Sulla idolized statuette--Verres the
most rapacious of Roman art collectors--Mark Antony and his
speedy methods--Cicero as an art lover--Pompey the unselfish
art lover--Julius Cæsar.
Shrewd and impassive connoisseurs like Sulla also had their hobbies
and fancies. Sulla’s particular fancy was a little statue of Apollo he
had pillaged from the temple of Delphi. This statue was more to him
than all the rest of the precious things forming his unique collection.
From this little god, called by Winckelmann “Sulla’s private travelling
god,” he never separated. He used to kiss it devoutly and seems to have
consulted it in great emergencies. At times he used to carry it in his
breast, says Plutarch. We may note by the way that this Apollo was
not considered by connoisseurs the best piece of Sulla’s collection,
the real gem was his Hercules, a work by Lysippus. The story of this
Hercules is told by Martial and Statius, who inform us that it measured
a little less than a Roman foot, about nine inches. Notwithstanding its
modest dimensions the statuette was modelled with such grandeur and
majestic sentiment as to cause Statius to comment, “_parvusque videri,
sentirique ingens_” (small in appearance, but immense in effect). It
represented Hercules in a smilingly serene attitude, seated on a rock,
holding a club in his right hand and in the other a cup. It was in
fact one of those statuettes which Romans called by the Greek word
_epitrapezios_, and which were placed on dining-tables as the _genius
loci_ of the repast.
The history of this gem of Sulla’s collection is uncommon, and its
vicissitudes most remarkable. The statue was originally a gift made
by Lysippus to Alexander the Great. This sovereign and conqueror was
so attached to Lysippus’ present that he carried the statue with him
wherever he went. When dying he indulged in a touching adieu to the
cherished statuette.
After Alexander, the little Hercules fell into the hands of another
conqueror, Hannibal. It is not known how he came to be the possessor
of Lysippus’ work, but it may be explained by the fact that Hannibal,
being a collector of art and somewhat of a connoisseur and, above
all, as Cornelius Nepos states, a great admirer of Greek art, was a
keen-eyed hunter after rarities in art. However, be that as it may,
Hannibal seems to have been possessed by the same fancy as Alexander,
for he carried the little statue with him on all his peregrinations,
and even took it to Bithynia, where, as history informs us, he
destroyed himself by poison. At his death the Hercules passed, in all
probability, into the hands of Prusias at whose court Hannibal died.
A century later the statue reappeared in Sulla’s collection. Very
likely it came into Sulla’s possession as a present from King
Nicomedes, who owed gratitude to Sulla for the restitution of the
throne of Bithynia.
After Sulla’s death it is difficult to locate this precious statue
of his famous collection. Presumably it passed from one collector to
another, and never left Rome. “Perhaps,” says Statius, “it found its
place in more than one Imperial collection.” The statue reappears
officially, however, under Domitian. At this time it is in the
possession of the above-quoted Vindex, a Gaul living in Rome, a friend
of Martial and Statius and one of the best art connoisseurs of his time.
At Vindex’s death the statuette disappears again, and no mention of it
has ever been made since by any writer. What may the fate have been of
this _chef-d’œuvre_ of Lysippus which passed from one collection to
another for more than four centuries?
Among greedy lovers of art, with a connoisseur’s eye as good as his
soul was unscrupulous, Verres takes the prize. He had learned the
rapacious trade of art looting under Sulla. Later on, not being
powerful enough nor daring to go to the length of the Dictator by
placing reluctant amateurs on the list of proscribed, he studiously
sought to gain his end by all forms of violence and vexatious methods.
When in Sicily as proconsul, he actually despoiled and denuded every
temple in the island.
“I defy you,” says Cicero in his indictment of Verres, “to find now in
Sicily, this rich province, so old, with opulent families and cities, a
single silver vase, a bronze of Corinth or Delos, one single precious
stone or pearl, a single work in gold or ivory, a single bronze, marble
or ivory statue; I defy you to find a single painting, a tapestry, that
Verres has not been after, examined and, if pleasing to him, pillaged.”
As for private property, when he heard of a citizen possessing some
object that excited his cupidity, to Verres all means of extortion
seemed good, including torture and fustigation. His passion was of
such an uncontrollable nature that even when invited to dinner by
his friends he could not resist scraping with his knife the fine
bas-reliefs of the silver plates and hiding them in the folds of his
toga. Yet this greedy, unscrupulous amateur, whom Cicero mercilessly
indicted in his _In Verrem_, was such a lover of the objects of his
collection that he faced death rather than give up some fine vases of
Corinthian bronze which Mark Antony had demanded from him as a forced
gift.
Mark Antony, who followed Sulla’s methods in forming one of the finest
of collections, was, like his violent predecessors, a type of collector
which finds no counterpart in our times. His fine library had cost many
victims, his taste being rather eclectic, there seems to have been no
security in Rome for any kind of amateur who happened to possess rare
and interesting curios. Nonius was proscribed because he refused to
part with a rare opal, a precious stone of the size of a hazelnut.
“What an obstinate man, that Nonius,” remarks Pliny (XXXVII, 21) most
candidly, “to be so attached to an object for which he was proscribed!
Animals are certainly wiser when they abandon to the hunter that part
of their body for which they are being chased.”
Mark Antony was not so good a connoisseur as Verres, but having no less
a passion for collecting art and being no less unscrupulous and more in
a position to use violence without the risk of being accused before the
Roman citizens, as happened to Verres in the end, there was no limit
to his schemes. After the battle of Pharsalia he managed to seize all
Pompey’s artistic property, as well as his furniture and gardens, and
after Cæsar’s murder Antony, to whom we owe one of the finest orations
ever conceived, the one he delivered before the dead body of his
friend, lost no time in plundering Cæsar’s property and transporting
to his gardens all the objects of art Cæsar had left to the people of
Rome. The information comes from Cicero with these words: “The statues
and pictures which with his gardens Cæsar bequeathed to the people, he
(Antony) carried off partly to his garden at Pompeii, partly to his
country-house.”
Speaking of this collection, it is believed that the colossal Jupiter
now in the Louvre Museum not only belonged to Mark Antony, but was the
work of Myron which the Triumvir had stolen from Samos. Should this be
so, the pedigree of this statue is one of the few that can be actually
traced through the centuries. Brought to Rome by Mark Antony, this
Jupiter was later placed in the Capitol by Augustus. The fine statue
was then passed from one emperor to another, to sink into the general
oblivion of art at the end of the Roman Empire. It reappears in Rome
in the sixteenth century. It was then in the possession of Marguerite
of Antioch, Duchess of Camerino. The statue was greatly mutilated,
having lost both legs and arms. The Duchess presented what remained of
this famous Jupiter to Perronet de Granvelle. Subsequently cardinal
and minister of Charles V, on his retirement to his native country,
Perronet de Granvelle took the Jupiter to Besançon and placed it in the
garden of his castle. When Louis XIV took Besançon, the magistrates
of the city offered the French monarch what he might otherwise have
taken, the statue of Jupiter. Transferred from Besançon to Versailles,
this magnificent statue which by rare chance had escaped serious damage
during the barbarian ages finally met two authentic barbarians in the
artists charged with its restoration. To clean off the old patina from
the statue--think of it--Girardon had a layer of marble taken off
with the chisel, and Drouilly, not perceiving that the god had been
formerly in a sitting posture, or more probably not choosing to notice
the fact as not appealing to his artistic conception, made the Jupiter
a standing statue by adjusting and cutting the parts otherwise in the
way for this kind of adaptation. The only part of the statue that does
not seem to have suffered any damage is the head.
Even Brutus and Cassius appear not to have been indifferent to
the collector passion. Brutus, more especially, used to devote to
the collecting of art the less agitated moments of his troubled
life. The gem of his collection was considered to be a bronze by
Strongylion. Pliny tells us that this statue of Brutus was called
“the young Philippian,” _Strongylion fecit puerum, quem amando Brutus
Philippiensis cognomine suo illustravit_ (XXXIV, 19).
Cicero may be quoted as a type of the inconsistent art collector. A man
of dubious artistic taste and snobbish tendencies but who becomes a
true art lover when he specializes in that part of art collecting more
closely in keeping with his studies. Thus in his letter to Atticus he
reveals his love of books and old Greek works, and how fond he was of
good bindings, etc. As a collector of art Cicero leaves one doubtful as
to his taste and connoisseurship, qualities to which he seems to lay
claim in more than one of his speeches. When he writes to his friend
Atticus, his good counsellor, the man charged to buy art for him, he
does not express himself either as a real lover of art or a genuine
connoisseur. “Buy me anything that is suited for the decoration of my
Tusculum,” he writes to Atticus. “_Hermathena_ might be an excellent
ornament for my Academy, _Hermes_ are placed now in all Gymnasia.... I
have built exedras according to the latest fashion. I should like to
put paintings there as an ornament,” etc.
In _Paradoxa_, a collection of philosophical thoughts called Socratic
in style by Cicero, in which he says he has called a spade a spade,
_Socratica longeque verissima_, Cicero has the courage to write the
following paragraph in defence of Carneades, who maintained that a head
of a Faun had been found in the raw marble of a quarry at Chios:--
“One calls the thing imaginary, a freak of chance, just as if marble
could not contain the forms of all kinds of heads, even those of
Praxiteles. It is a fact that these heads are made by taking away the
superfluous marble, and in modelling them even a Praxiteles does not
add anything of his own, because when much marble has been taken away
one reaches the real form, and we see the accomplished work which was
there before. This is what may have happened in the quarry of Chios.”
The gamut of art collectors would not be complete without quoting a
few samples of worthy art lovers who either understood art, like the
Greeks, as a means of public enjoyment, or in some way showed genuine
and most praiseworthy qualities as true collectors of art.
It is doubtful whether the great Pompey really felt any pleasure in
collecting art pieces, or whether he simply did it to ingratiate
himself with the public. But as a matter of fact his attitude towards
the enjoyment of art was certainly of a most unselfish character.
Though he very sumptuously embellished his gardens on the Janiculum,
this was nothing compared with the public buildings he enriched with
rare statues, paintings, etc. His theatre was a magnificent emporium of
art of which we possess some samples in the colossal Melpomene of the
Louvre Museum and the bronze Hercules excavated under Pius IX, now one
of the finest pieces of the Vatican collection. Both these statues were
found buried on the spot where once the monumental theatre of Pompey
had stood.
But the artistic glories of this theatre were perhaps even surpassed
by the interminable portico Pompey constructed and adorned for the
benefit of the public. This spot, which was called the Promenade of
Pompeius, became one of the fashionable walks of Rome.
“You disdain,” asks Propertius of his lady love, “the shady colonnades
of Pompey’s portico, its magnificent tapestries and the fine avenue of
leafy plane-trees?” (IV, 8). And in another place Cynthia forbids her
paramour this promenade with the words: “I prohibit you ever to strut
in your best fineries in that promenade.”
Pliny (XXXV, 9), says that Pompey had some famous paintings in his
galleries and seems to have been more especially struck by a work
by Polygnotus, representing “a man on a ladder,” and a landscape
by Pausias. Curiously enough the characteristics that seem to have
attracted Pliny in the two works do not point to the noted writer as
a great art critic. He says that the remarkable side of Polygnotus’
painting was that the beholder could not tell whether the man on the
ladder was ascending or descending, and that the main characteristic of
Pausias’ work consisted in two black oxen outlined on a dark landscape.
Cæsar, who showed himself to be a better connoisseur than his rival
Pompey, and who, being of a more refined nature, would not, as did
Pompey, have indulged in the gratification of parading the chlamys of
Alexander the Great in a triumphal car drawn by four elephants, spent
considerable sums on the embellishment of Rome with art. He also, like
many collectors of art, had his hobbies, carrying with him through his
various campaigns an endless number of precious mosaic tables, and
always keeping in his tent a fine work of a Greek artist, a statue of
Venus, with whom he claimed relationship. Though he showed eclectic
taste in his gifts to the town and temples, he was in private, like a
true connoisseur and refined lover of art, somewhat of a specialist,
being extremely fond of cameos and cut stones. Of these he had six
distinct collections that held the admiration of all the connoisseurs
of the city.
He was, however, not only a passionate seeker after antiques, most
boldly acquiring precious stones, curiosities, statues, pictures by
old masters (_gemmas_, _tereumata_, _signa_, _tabulas operis antiqui
animosissime comparasse_), as Suetonius tells us, but also the
ever-ready patron of modern art. In this character he paid 80 talents
(about £16,000) for a painting by Timonacus. Damophilus and Gorgas,
painters, sculptors and decorators, worked for him to embellish the
Arena he built in Rome, an edifice capable of holding 2500 spectators.
Many artists worked at his Forum, a monument to his name for which he
paid a sum equivalent to twenty million liras for the ground alone.
Meanwhile he was also busy embellishing other cities of Italy, Gaul,
Spain, Greece, and even Asia. Suetonius states that Cæsar sent a
company of artists and workers to rebuild destroyed Corinth and to
replace its statues on their pedestals.
Being a most unselfish kind of lover of art, Cæsar was one of the few
who did not yield to the momentary fashion that led patricians to send
their art pieces out of Rome, to embellish and decorate their country
houses and magnificent villas.
This peculiar fashion that exiled so many fine statues from Rome, leads
us to speak of another noble type of collector, Marcus Agrippa, who,
like Cæsar, not only set a good example by keeping all his treasures
of art in Rome, mostly for the enjoyment of the public, but protested
against the new custom, and held meetings and lectures to dissuade
wealthy Romans from sending away from the city their _chef-d’œuvres_.
Such was the spirit characterizing Agrippa as a lover of art.