Monday, February 13, 2017

Channeling the Ancients in Nostalgic Europe

Anonymous European Gem-cutter
Cameo - Aeneas supplicating Dido
undated
agate
Hermitage, Saint Petersburg

"Verrius Flaccus reports that when the Roman people were in the grip of a plague and an oracle said it was happening because the gods "were being looked down upon," the city was seized by anxiety because the oracle was opaque; and it came to pass that on the days of the Circus Games a boy was looking down on the procession from a garret, reporting to his father the arrangement of the secret sacred objects he saw in the cart's coffer. When his father told the senate what had happened, it decreed that the route of the procession should be covered with an awning; and when the plague had been put to rest, the boy who had clarified the ambiguous oracle gained the use of the praetexta as his reward."

Anonymous Spanish Gem-cutter
Cameo - Aurora in Chariot
ca. 1550-1600
agate
Hermitage, Saint Petersburg

Anonymous Italian Gem-cutter
Intaglio - Three Graces
16th century
rock-crystal
Hermitage, Saint Petersburg

Anonymous Italian Gem-cutter
Intaglio - Adonis
ca. 1700-1730
rock-crystal
Hermitage, Saint Petersburg

"But since the topic of pleasure has come up, Aristotle teaches us which pleasures we have to guard against. Human beings have five senses, which the Greeks call aistheseis, and these  touch, taste, smell, sight, hearing  are the pathways by which the body and mind seek pleasure. Pleasure derived immoderately from all these senses is base and wicked, but excessive pleasure derived from taste and touch  a compound pleasure, as wise men have judged it  is the most disgusting of all: to those, especially, who surrendered to these pleasures the Greeks applied the terms for the most serious of vices, calling them akrates or akolastoi, or as we say, "incontinent" or "uncontrolled." We understand that the two pleasures of taste and touch  that is, food and sex  are the only ones that human beings share with the beasts, and that's why anyone wholly in the grip of these pleasures is counted among the animals of the fields and the wilds; all other pleasures, which derive from the three remaining senses, are peculiar to human beings."

François-Joseph Bosio
Cupid with Bow
1808
marble
Hermitage, Saint Petersburg

Adamo Tadolini
Ganymede with Eagle
before 1868
marble
Hermitage, Saint Petersburg

Anonymous Italian Sculptor
Niobe's Son
ca. 1750
terracotta statuette
Hermitage, Saint Petersburg

Albert Ernest Carrier-Belleuse
Satyr and Bacchante
ca. 1850
terracotta
Hermitage, Saint Petersburg

"That is my goal for the present work: it comprises many different disciplines, many lessons, examples drawn from many periods, but brought together into a harmonious whole. If you neither disdain the things already familiar to you nor shun those you do not know, you will find many things that are either a pleasure to read or a mark of cultivation to have read or useful to remember. I judge that I have included nothing that is either useless to know or difficult to learn: everything here will make your mind more active, your memory better stocked, your speech more skillful, your language more refined  save here and there where the natural flow of the Latin language might fail me, who was born under an alien sky. And if others chance at some point to have the time and desire to make this work's acquaintance, I hope that they will, as I request, be fair and righteous judges, should my discourse lack the native elegance of the Roman tongue."


Berthel Thorvaldsen
Cupid and Dionysus
1824
marble relief
Hermitage, Saint Petersburg

Berthel Thorvaldsen
Anacreon and Cupid
1823
marble relief
Hermitage, Saint Petersburg

Anonymous Italian Gem-cutter
Cameo - Profile of woman
17th century
sardonyx
Hermitage, Saint Petersburg

Anonymous Italian Gem-cutter
Cameo - Sabina
17th century
sardonyx
Hermitage, Saint Petersburg

workshop of Antonio Lombardo
Spoils of war
ca. 1508
marble relief
Hermitage, Saint Petersburg

Antonio Lombardo
Forge of Hephaestus
ca. 1508
marble relief
Hermitage, Saint Petersburg

Quoted passages from the Saturnalia of Macrobius, written in Latin in about AD 430, the English translation revised by Robert A. Kaster and published by Loeb Classical Library in 2011