Vermeule, 'Greek Sculpture in The Art Museum, Princeton University, Greek Originals, Roman Copies and Variants', Bryn Mawr Classical Review 9502
URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/bmcr/bmcr-9502-vermeule-greek
@@@@95.2.6, Ridgway et al., Greek Sculpture in the Princeton Art Museum
Brunilde S. Ridgway, and Jon M. Berkin, Thomas M. Brogan, Joan B.
Connelly, Yasar E. Ersoy, J. Cinder Griffin, Susan C. Jones,
Ann-Marie Knoblauch, Geralynn S. Lederman, Thomas L. Milbank,
Danielle M. Newland, Greek Sculpture in The Art Museum,
Princeton University, Greek Originals, Roman Copies and
Variants. Princeton: The Art Museum, Princeton University,
1994. Pp. 131. 8 color illustrations. 97 black and white
illustrations. ISBN-0-943012-16-3 (hb) $45.00. 0-943012-17-1 (pb)
$24.95.
Reviewed by Cornelius C. Vermeule
-- Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
This thoroughly handsome and most professional volume is a
publication of the Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton
University. Almost all the forty sculptures catalogued formed the
subjects of a Graduate Seminar in the Department of Classical and
Near Eastern Archaeology at Bryn Mawr College, directed by
Professor Brunilde S. Ridgway during the second semester of the
1989-90 academic year (January-May 1990). Eight of the above
wrote entries along with Professor Ridgway. Additional entries
were provided at a later date by another Bryn Mawr College
graduate student, Thomas L. Milbank (Princeton Class of 1990),
and also by Joan B. Connelly (Princeton Class of 1976; Ph.D. Bryn
Mawr, 1984), Associate Professor of Fine Arts at New York
University and a former Dean at Bryn Mawr College.
In his Foreword, Director Allen Rosenbaum graciously and
eloquently pays tribute to the Princeton archaeologists in
classroom and field, Howard Crosby Butler, Erik Sjoqvist, Richard
Stillwell, T. Leslie Shear, Jr., and William C. Childs, all of
whom have been involved in some way with the growth and the
understanding of the Classical collection. He then moves on to
speak, and very rightly so, of the achievements of Frances Follin
Jones, Curator of Ancient Art from 1943 to 1984. Her successor,
Robert Guy, served as Associate Curator of Ancient Art from 1984
to 1991, when he departed for a senior research fellowship at
Corpus Christi College, Oxford. His successor, J. Michael
Padgett, has provided a History of the Collection, which follows
the Director's Foreword.
Here more names great in the annals of art and archaeology
appear, notably Professors Allan Marquand and Arthur Frothingham,
who convinced the College to build an art museum on Princeton
campus. The first phase of construction was completed in 1888. In
terms of ancient sculpture there were sporadic accessions until
1922, when Frank Jewett Mather, Jr., was appointed Director of
the Museum and McCormick Hall was built.
In 1929 the Sardis Excavation Society donated two marbles, a
Lion's Head Spout (no. 22) and a Seated Kybele (no. 30),
certainly from Professor Howard Crosby Butler's excavations of
1910-1914 or 1922. Princeton's work in the excavation of
Antioch-on-the-Orontes, Seleucia, and Daphne (1932 to 1939) under
the leadership of Professors Charles Rufus Morey and Richard
Stillwell brought mosaics, sculptures, and architectural
fragments to Princeton. The keeping of meticulous archives, field
records, and photographs enabled Professor Doro Levi to spend his
World War II years of separation from Fascist Italy producing the
great volumes on the Antioch mosaic pavements, in the
Archaeological Museum at Antakya, still in situ, and now
scattered around America.
The largest and most important group of Greek and Roman
sculptures came to The Art Museum during the Curatorship of
Frances Follin Jones. In 1962 and 1964, Professor Emeritus Edward
Sampson ('14) donated the collection formed by his father Alden
Sampson. Alden Sampson had travelled widely around Greece and
Italy, sometimes painting side-by-side with his younger
contemporary Edward Waldo Forbes, long Director of the Fogg
Museum of Art at Harvard. Alden Sampson acquired splendid heads
from Attic stelai of the fourth century B.C. and fine, if
battered Roman copies of likenesses of Demosthenes, Homer, a
putative Perikles, and a fragmentary, upper part of the head of
the playwright Aischylos. This collection had spent many years on
deposit in the labyrinth-like old Smithsonian Institution in
Washington, D.C. As Michael Padgett has pointed out, when the
much-missed Peter H. von Blanckenhagen bequeathed his very Late
Antique head of the Lysippic Sokrates to Princeton, The Art
Museum could rival any collection in the New World in its display
of thought-provoking presentations of Greek literati and
"Perikles" (no. 11), now recognized as a somewhat-ideal
representation perhaps of one of the Greek generals in the
Persian Wars. Even the Sampson head of an elderly man of around
340 to 330 B.C. has been thought to relate closely to the bronze
original of the so-called Lateran (now Vatican) Sophokles. And to
all this literate wealth must be added the Stroganoff relief of
the playwright Menander contemplating a text and a collection of
masks, a great Augustan sculpture (no. 32), which Frances Jones
purchased at the time when M. Bieber was much on the Princeton
scene, helping with F.F. Jones, The Theater in Ancient
Art, teaching a seminar, and revising her own The History
of the Greek and Roman Theater for the Princeton University
Press. The presence of the Menander Relief in New York was due to
the Neopolitan antiquarian-restorer Piero Tozzi, once a pupil of
the great Vittorio Spinazzola, who wrote the book on the
decorative arts of Pompeii and Herculaneum in the Museo
Nazionale, Naples.
Being a lover of other marbles with histories, my eyes fell
upon the small, rather pedestrian Attic Grave Stele (no. 6,
broken across at the head of the larger figure, and somewhat
worn), the gift of Mrs. Ernest Sandoz. Its nineteenth century
associations far outweigh its aesthetic values, although students
can find it a springboard to study of other Athenian grave
markers, records of decrees, and votive reliefs of around 398/7
(Jones) or 340 B.C. (Ridgway). Frances Jones has shown
(Hesperia Suppl. 20, 1982, pp. 63-64 [not 65-66], pl. 10)
that the donor's father, Rear Admiral Thomas Crabbe, surely
acquired the "modest gravestone" of a maiden and her servant or
younger sister at the Piraeus or in Athens during the first
eighteen days of August, 1852. The Admiral (then Captain) was
forced by mechanical difficulties or required by protocol to stay
in Piraeus harbor with the steam frigate under his command (the
USS San Jacinto), while en route from Constantinople to Trieste.
Another acquisition from Athens in the nineteenth century
came as a gift of Joan Prentice von Erdberg, a descendant of the
collector (unnamed). This fragmentary, inscribed votive relief of
about 390 to 375 B.C. (no. 3) shows Myron and Lykiskos, who may
be descendants of the famous sculptor who made the Discobolus,
Athena and Marsyas, the Cow, and perhaps a Dog and a Drunken Hag.
Myron had a sculptor son named Lykios.
While Princeton is lucky to possess a Julio-Claudian version
of the head of the Satyr from the popular Hellenistic rococo
group known as the "Invitation to the Dance" (no. 26), the
recently-accessioned Head of a Nymph (no. 27) of about A.D. 260,
from the famous cache of sculptures at Antioch-on-the-Orontes,
had its own head of a Satyr which has stayed in the
Archaeological Museum at Antakya rather than coming to Princeton.
It would have been useful to include a photograph of the Antioch
Satyr in the text about the Antioch Nymph, and possibly even a
view of the group on the Severan coin of Cyzicus or a
reconstruction. I had already shown them together, thanks to the
kindnesses of Richard Stillwell, in Essays in Memory of Karl
Lehman, New York, 1964, p. 369, fig. 14. But perhaps
photographic comparanda, useful also elsewhere, would have made
this wonderful Catalogue too large and certainly more expensive.
Since the Nymph from the "Invitation to the Dance" was
seated in a manner recalling an X-rated Tyche of Antioch,
comparisons could be made with the other masterpiece accessioned
by Curator Michael Padgett from the Syrian excavations, the
Gravestone of Tryphe found at Seleucia-on-the-Orontes (no. 10).
Tryphe is posed like the Tyche of Antioch, a footstool where
swimming Orontes should be. Unfortunately her face and right hand
raised to it have been smashed away. Compare Karen Manchester, "A
Bronze Statuette Representing the Tyche of Antioch: Roman Copy or
Roman Original?", as Re/Collections, No. 1, 1994; also, "An
Obsession with Fortune: Tyche in Greek and Roman Art," Yale
University Art Gallery, Exhibition Events, September
through November 1994, p. 1.
At the end. of the Catalogue there is a section called
"Dubitanda", something that Professor Ridgway had addressed in
connection with her catalogue of the Classical sculptures in the
Rhode Island School of Design at Providence (the last five
entries, nos. 51-55). Amy Brauer and I called such questionable
sculptures in stone "Post-Classical or Post-Antique" in our 1990
Stone Sculptures, The Greek, Roman and Etruscan Collections of
the Harvard University Art Museums. At Princeton, the Head of
a Youth which T. Leslie Shear, Sr., purchased in Rhodes (no. 35)
in the early years of the Italian occupation was surely created
in Italy and planted in the new colony so recently wrested from
the Ottoman Empire by gunboat diplomacy. The Head of Aphrodite
(no. 36) likewise came to Rhodes from Italy, having been carved
there at the turn of the present century. Adolf Furtwangler wrote
about heads like this immediately after his visit to America in
October, 1904. A similar head, also compared with the Aphrodite
of Melos in the Louvre, was published without location by Gisela
M.A. Richter, in her The Sculpture and Sculptors of the
Greeks, Fourth Edition, Newly Revised, New Haven and London,
1970, p. 142, fig. 575 (Head of the Aphrodite of Melos, fig.
574). The Female Head (no. 37) is rightly published as a
misunderstanding of fifth and fourth century B.C. models. The
source of this head may have been an atelier in Athens, a
workshop also available to the shopkeepers and others of Rhodes.
On the other hand, I do not feel ready to consign the pair
of fragmentary Archaistic reliefs to the limbo of doubt (Hestia,
no. 38, and Zeus, no. 39). Archaistic reliefs of this type have
such iconographic and stylistic peculiarities that these
sculptures can be explained as something one would have found in
the ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum, or a contemporary house in
Naples, Capua, or the areas of Rome and Ostia. The Small Female
Head in the Alden Sampson Collection (no. 40) does not suffer
from lack of contact with Antiquity. It must have come from an
Attic fourth century B.C. votive relief. What has happened to put
the viewer off is that someone in relatively modern times has
taken a tool and "sharpened" the outline of the eyes, the
worn-down nose, and the mouth. The head should have been allowed
to remain in a condition similar to no. 67 in the Harvard
University Art Museums, a gift from the daughters of Charles
Eliot Norton, teacher of both Alden Sampson and Edward Waldo
Forbes. (Indeed, Alden Sampson joined with Richard Norton of
Cyrene fame, son of Charles Eliot, and Edward Waldo Forbes in
presenting one of the finest Palmyrene sepulchral reliefs in
America to the Fogg Museum of Art at Harvard. Richard Norton had
purchased the sculpture in Damascus. See Stone Sculptures,
p. 163, no. 149.)
To conclude on a note of triumph rather than one of mild
negativism, the fairly recently acquired (1983-84) Tarentine
Funerary (or Votive?) Relief, catalogued here by Professor
Connelly, is a tour de force in the realm of sculpture
related to the theater, so much a strength in the Princeton
collection. The date is early in the third century B.C., because
the subject is taken from the Rudens of Plautus (303 to
290 B.C.). In a big, bold, heavy and dramatic style, the
distraught old priestess with her giant temple key over her
shoulder protects and comforts the maiden Palaestra and the
serving girl Ampelisca. The younger women are seated on the altar
of Aphrodite, having survived a shipwreck and subsequent attempts
at recapture. Maiden and servant were being abducted from Cyrene
to Sicily by the pimp Labrax. While the play is classed as a
comedy, and most such scenes in Tarentine funerary reliefs come
from Greek tragedy, this relief could be funerary or votive since
the presentation here is far from comic in outlook.
The Princeton and the Harvard Catalogues are exactly the
same size and about the same thickness, a difference being 40
entries for the former and 156 sculptures in the latter. These
numbers suggest the riches to come in the (Etruscan ? and) Roman
volume from The Art Museum at Princeton University. In The Art
Museum Princeton University, Newsletter, Fall 1993,
"Recent Acquisition", p. 2, J. Michael Padgett has published a
Claudian (A.D. 41 to 54) marble portrait of a beardless,
middle-aged man with short hair and the veristic look of an
important person of the period around 50 B.C. He may be a
dynastic memorial to Julius Caesar. In any case he will look
splendid in the Roman volume, which I hope Curator Padgett will
prepare, soon.