Chapter 7

The Sculptures, Revisited

That Vincenzo Giustiniani’s collection of ancient Greco-Roman sculpture was more impressive in number than in quality of its single pieces has been a verdict repeated over centuries. Whether to counter it, or because he believed in their outstanding artistic value, Vincenzo himself did not spare any costs to celebrate his marbles. Several renowned artists of the time were invited to draw a selection of his sculptures for publication in the monumental two-volume catalogue Galleria Giustiniana, among them two that eventually adorned Mary Clark Thompson’s Breakfast Bower at Sonnenberg.

With taste, research interest, economic value of objects, and even ethics on the art market changing, each of Mary Clark Thompson’s Giustiniani sculptures has a different trajectory. A statue of the god Dionysos (ancient god of wine, theater and transformation) reclining on a panther, for example, figures among the treasures of the Galleria Giustiniana. Still over 250 years later, art dealer Sangiorgi, when he tried to sell it to the Metropolitan Museum, praised it as a “first rate” work that critics would recognize as “most important.”¹ Today, curators judge it more a work of French artist François Duquesnoy (1597-1643), who used different fragments of unrelated ancient sculptures to complete the figure. It therefore is not on show in the Greek and Roman galleries, but in a gallery of European painting at the Metropolitan as a complement to the French baroque.

Building on the idea that objects also have a “biography”² we analyzed the sculptures for what they are. Rather than filtering out the ancient parts and dismissing the rest, we tried to study each fragment as carefully as their collage into a new sculpture, all in their own right. This is in line with new trends in scholarship and conservation practice. A “cult of the original” in the 20th century led archaeologists, art historians and conservators alike to assign value only to the ancient parts of a sculpture. Later additions were of no interest and therefore removed. This happened to several of the Giustiniani sculptures at the Metropolitan Museum, to various degrees.

More recently, interest in the different ways of reception and thereby “re-invention” of classical antiquity has directed attention to what art historian Aby Warburg once dubbed the “after-life” of antiquity. Alterations and transformations of objects have become as valuable an object of study and aesthetic appreciation as the originals they were supposedly made of. Museums in our day keep later additions of a sculpture as in the case of the statue of Septimius Severus from Mary Clark Thompson’s Giustiniani marbles, once at Williams College and now in Richmond, VA. Sometimes they even re-restore them, that is remount once removed additions.

Here we tell, as far as possible, the “biographies” of the Giustiniani marbles at Sonnenberg, from the origins of their single parts to their assemblage or removal, including their changing display settings and interpretations until today.

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1 Letter to Reverend Nevin from October 6, 1902 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, Archives): “di primo ordine … sculture queste che tutti i critici riconobbero come importantissime.”

2 Igor Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process,” in Arjun Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things, New York: Cambridge University Press 1986, 64-91.