The Pasquino Group: Menelaus Carrying the Body of Patroclus or Ajax Carrying the Body of Achilles?

Among the most poignant sculptures at the Loggia dei Lanzi (and my favorite) is the ancient Flavian era (1st century CE) Pasquino Group (also known as "Menelaus Carrying the Body of Patroclus" or "Ajax Carrying the Body of Achilles"), a group of marble sculptures that copy a Hellenistic bronze original, dating to ca. 200–150 BCE.    During the 16th century, various authors proposed different identifications for the dead figure, including Hercules, Geryon, and Alexander the Great. Bernhard Schweitzer's 1936 "Das Original der sogennanten Pasquino-Gruppe" identifies the subject of the group as Menelaus carrying the body of Patroclus, However, this identification has been questioned and the identification of Ajax carrying the body of Achilles is now widely accepted for most of the known 15 Roman copies.  However, five fragments of a Pasquino group were excavated from Hadrian's Villa by Gavin Hamilton in 1769. This sculpture was a part of the Roman emperor Hadrian's collection of copies of Greek masterpieces. Unlike other copies, the deceased figure in Hadrian's copy is wounded on the back. This has been interpreted as evidence that Hadrian's copy was meant to represent Menelaus and Patroclus, since the Iliad states that he was killed by a blow to the back. These fragments are in the Vatican Museums. The head of Menelaus is on display in the museum's Hall of Busts.

Menelaus (or Ajax), part of the Pasquino Group, at the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence, Italy © 2005 Mary Harrsch

Menelaus cradling a dead Patroclus or Ajax holding a dead Achilles, the so-called Pasquino Group, at the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence, Italy.© 2005 Mary Harrsch

Menelaus (or Ajax) at the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence, Italy © 2005 Mary Harrsch

The dead Patroclus (or Achilles), part of the Pasquino Group, at the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence, Italy
© 2005 Mary Harrsch

Bust of Menelaus at the Vatican Museums courtesy of Wikimedia Commons contributor shakko

Images are all mine except the one of the bust of Menelaus at the Vatican Museum.  It is courtesy of Wikimedia Commons contributor shakko.

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The erroneous mythology of the Renaissance

The so-called Rape of Polyxena by Pio Fedi, (1855-1865) at the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence Italy

Another statue in the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence is the so-called Rape of Polyxena by Pio Fedi produced between 1855 and 1865. Classicly speaking, however, it is not accurate to the original myth.

Polyxena is considered the Trojan version of Iphigenia, daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra. She is not in Homer's Iliad, appearing in works by later poets, perhaps to add romance to Homer's austere tale. 

During the Trojan War, Polyxena and Troilus were ambushed when they were attempting to fetch water from a fountain, and Troilus was killed by the Greek warrior Achilles, who soon became interested in the quiet sagacity of Polyxena.  Achilles, still recovering from Patroclus' death, found Polyxena's words a comfort and was later told to go to the temple of Apollo to meet her after her devotions. Achilles seemed to trust Polyxena—he told her of his only vulnerability: his vulnerable heel.

It was later in the temple of Apollo that Polyxena's brothers, Paris and Deiphobus, ambushed Achilles and shot him in the heel with an arrow, supposedly guided by the hand of Apollo himself, steeped in poison. 

Some claimed Polyxena committed suicide after Achilles' death out of guilt. According to Euripides, however, in his plays The Trojan Women and Hecuba, Polyxena's famous death was caused at the end of the Trojan War. Achilles' ghost had come back to the Greeks to demand the human sacrifice of Polyxena so as to appease the wind needed to set sail back to Hellas. Polyxena's virginity was critical to the honor of her character, and she was described as dying bravely as the son of Achilles, Neoptolemus, slit her throat.  There was no rape involved.

I was looking through my images of the sculpture by Fedi and came across a closeup that I had never shared online before.  When I was in Florence in 2005, the Uffitzi was doing some repair work and there was a rather unsightly framework of piping in the Loggia dei Lanzi and it appeared in the background of my closeup.  So, for those of you interested in photography and image editing, I selected the background and rendered just enough Gaussian blur in Photoshop to obscure the framework.  Then I also had a problem that Neoptolemus was heavily shadowed. I reduced the shadow as much as I could using Adobe Camera Raw then opened the image in ON1 Photo Raw, added dynamic contrast to enhance the texture then "painted" with light using the local effects palette to improve the light balance between Neoptolemus and Polyxena.  To finish it off I used Topaz Labs' Studio 2 Glow filter with the Bloom preset at 22 percent to soften the edges just enough to make them blend more naturally into the blurred background.

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Giambologna brings Heracles to Life

Yesterday, I featured the beautiful sculpture, "Kidnapping of the Sabine Women" by Giambologna displayed at the Loggia Dei Lanzi in Florence, Italy. Another spectacular work of Giambologna displayed there as well portrays the battle between Heracles and the centaur Nessus.

Nessus was a famous centaur who carried off Deianeira, the wife of Heracles, and tried to force himself on her.  Heracles saw him from across the river and shot a Hydra-poisoned arrow into Nessus's breast. As he lay dying, in a final act of malice, Nessus told Deianeira that his blood would ensure that Heracles would be true to her forever, knowing the blood to be infected with the hydra's poison. 

Sometime later, Deianeira's trust in Heracles began to wane because of his unrequited love for Iole, the daughter of King Eurytus of Oechalia. Heracles had been forbidden to marry Iole because her father, the king, feared she would meet the same fate as Heracles' first wife, Megara, who, along with their children, was murdered by Heracles when the jealous goddess Hera sent Heracles into a fit of madness.  So Heracles, denied Iole,  had married Deianeira instead and Deianeira was painfully aware of being second choice.

Heracles planned to attend a gathering of heroes, and Deianiera feared his passion would get the better of him. So, to bind Heracles to her, Deianeira, remembering what Nessus had said about his blood, spread the centaur's blood on a robe and gave it to her husband. After Heracles left for the gathering, Deianeira accidentally spilled a portion of the centaur's blood onto the floor. To her horror, it began to fume by the light of the rising sun. She instantly recognized it as poison and sent her messenger to warn Heracles but it was too late. Heracles lay dying slowly and painfully as the robe burned his skin.

Images: Hercules (Heracles) and Nessus, 1599, by Giambologna photographed at the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence, Italy.

Hercules (Heracles) and Nessus, 1599, by Giambologna photographed at the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence, Italy

Hercules (Heracles) and Nessus, 1599, by Giambologna photographed at the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence, Italy

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Rape of the Sabine Women in Art

The ancient legend of the abduction of the Sabine women by the men of Rome has inspired artists for centuries. Upon finding the city bereft of women, Rome’s founder, Romulus, invited the neighboring peoples to a festival as a pretense to the abduction. Each Roman youth carried off an unmarried woman from the Sabine contingent as his bride. When the Sabines later attacked Rome to reclaim their females, the women ran onto the battlefield and secured peace between their fathers and husbands.

Here we see two dramatic treatments of the subject by Italian artists Andrea Andreani and Giambologna.  Andreani, an Italian engraver, revived the technique of the chiaroscuro print, the use of light and shadow to define three-dimensional objects, at the end of the sixteenth century and created a number of ambitious works including a reproduction of Andrea Mantegna's "Triumph of Caesar".  Some evidence exists that ancient Greek and Roman artists used chiaroscuro effects but the technique was first brought to its full potential by Leonardo da Vinci in the late 15th century.  Andreani's 1585 woodcut, Rape of the Sabines,  reproduces, to scale but with slight adjustments, the plaque that was intended to clarify the subject of Giambologna's celebrated marble group in the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence which had been unveiled in Florence in 1583 to public acclaim.

The original woodcut is printed in three sections on six sheets of paper. To make a chiaroscuro woodcut, the key block was inked with the darkest tone and printed first. Subsequent blocks were inked with progressively lighter tones and carefully measured to print in register with the key block. Chiaroscuro woodcuts are usually printed in only one color, brown, gray, green, or sepia being preferred. The process attempted to imitate wash and watercolor drawings and also became popular as an inexpensive method of reproducing paintings. The print in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art is a rather harsh orange.  Whether this was intended to be brown or sepia I'm not sure.  I thought the color obscures the details, though, so I have converted it to black and white and adjusted the saturation and contrast to showcase the intricacies of Andreani's work. 

The sculpture is the original work of Gaimbologna's "Kidnapping of the Sabine Women" on display in the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence that the woodcut is based upon. The full length image is courtesy of Wikimedia Commons contributor Thermos.  The detailed closeups are my own images taken in Florence in 2005.

Rape of the Sabines chiaroscuro woodcut by Andrea Andreani, 1585

Kidnapping of the Sabines by Giambologna, 1574-1582

Detail of Kidnapping of the Sabines by Giambologna, 1574-1582

Kidnapping of the Sabines by Giambologna, 1574-1582

Kidnapping of the Sabines by Giambologna, 1574-1582

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