THE BELVEDERE TORSO: MAN OR BEAST?

THE BELVEDERE TORSO: MAN OR BEAST?

 

The Belvedere Torso was once one of the most famous sculptures in the world, despite being so badly-damaged that it is missing its head, both arms and both lower legs.  It was held in such high esteem that the 1816 Parliamentary Select Committee, established to determine how much the British Museum should pay Lord Elgin for the Parthenon Marbles (the ‘Elgin Marbles’), asked its expert witnesses whether the sculptures from the Parthenon were in the same league as acknowledged masterpieces, like the Apollo Belvedere, the Belvedere Torso and the Laocoön?

                      Plaster cast of the Belvedere Torso in the Ashmolean Cast Gallery, Oxford

In the 18^th century this sculpture was so famous that art historians and Romantic poets could simply refer to it as ‘the Torso’ or ‘le Torse’ (always with a capital T), confident that their readers would be familiar with it through various media: engravings, drawings, paintings or plaster casts.  It says a lot for the Torso that even in an age which didn’t see the aesthetic appeal of fragments or damaged statues (and which supported a thriving industry in Rome dedicated to ‘restoring’ such fragments), it managed to hold its own as an unrestored fragment.  I suspect that part of its appeal also lay in the element of mystery that surrounded it – and still surrounds it - in terms of its provenance, purpose and subject-matter.  It’s more evocative as a fragment than it would have been as an intact colossal statue, because you can read into it what you want – the most interesting ancient statues are arguably the ones whose subject cannot be firmly identified, such as the Riace Warriors, the Youth of Antikythera or the Youth of Marathon.  

So let’s start with what we don’t know.  We don’t know when or where this sculpture was found, or who found it – although we can make an educated guess that it was found in Rome or its environs.  We don’t know the sculpture’s original location, or the context in which it was displayed.  We don’t know, with any certainty, when the sculpture was made. We don’t know who the sculpture was intended to represent, or whether it was a standalone work or part of a group.  Unlike its stablemate the Laocoön, the Torso cannot be identified with any statue described by ancient authors such as Pliny the Elder.

 We do, however, know the name of the sculptor who made it, because – unusually for ancient Greek sculpture - the sculptor has inscribed his name on it, in Greek:  Apollonios Nestoros Athenaios epoiei (‘Apollonios, son of Nestor, the Athenian, made it’).  However, this doesn’t get us much further, as there is no reference to an Athenian sculptor called Apollonios in Pliny’s Natural History, or indeed in any other ancient author.   

Can we work out when the statue was made?  Johann Winckelmann (the influential 18^th-century art historian who was the first person to categorise ancient art by its ‘period’), argued that the style of the lettering on the inscription showed that it had been carved well after the time of Alexander the Great (who died in 323) but the quality of the carving was so sublime that it couldn’t have been produced after the Roman conquest of Greece (he was very keen on the idea that the best Greek art came from the period when the Greek states enjoyed political freedom, before being absorbed into the Roman Empire).  He therefore concluded that the sculpture was produced during the Hellenistic period (after Alexander’s death) but before the sack of Corinth (usually regarded as the key date for the Roman conquest of Greece) in 146 BC.  

Most modern authorities, on grounds of style, agree that Winckelmann was probably right about the date when the original statue was made; the seated composition (comparable with the bronze Boxer in the Terme Museum in Rome) would be typical of about 200 BC.  However, it is now generally agreed that the Torso is a high-quality copy, probably made during the 1^st century BC, of this lost original, which may well have been bronze (like the Boxer).  A further possibility is that the Torso dates from the Roman period and was a Hellenistic-style ‘retro’ piece produced for a Roman patron.     

                           Cast of the Boxer (Hellenistic, c 200 BC) in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

 Why did the Belvedere Torso become so Famous?

Regular readers of this blog will know that a sculpture’s fame depends on a combination of circumstances, including: when it was found; where it was displayed; who wrote about it; whether it found its way into guidebooks, or works of literature; whether it was disseminated across Europe in the form of plaster casts.  So how important were these various factors in the rise of fame of the Belvedere Torso? 

·        It was one of the earliest ancient sculptures to be rediscovered during the Renaissance, known as early as the 1430s (in the collection of Cardinal Colonna) – as we have seen with statues like the Apollo Belvedere and the Laocoon, the earlier a piece was discovered, the more cultural clout it tended to acquire   

·        In the 16^th it was acquired by Pope Clement VII and was considered of such high quality that it was put on display in the Belvedere Court (which is how it acquired its name) alongside the Apollo and the Laocoön.  In joining this very select ‘club’ it also became accessible to visitors to Rome.   

·        The statue’s reputation was boosted by the endorsement of Michelangelo, who claimed that his own work incorporated certain principles which he had discovered through studying the Torso. Various anecdotes grew up around Michelangelo’s interest in the statue, including an incident where a cardinal found the sculptor kneeling in front of the Torso in a compromising position; Michelangelo said he was just getting up close in order to examine the workmanship.  Stories also circulated that Michelangelo had been asked to restore the statue, but had refused to do so, on the grounds that it was so close to perfection that it couldn’t be imitated.  However, that didn’t stop one resident of Florence from showing tourists a wax model which supposedly represented Michelangelo’s restoration plans.  Rubens also sketched the Torso on a visit to Rome in 1601, showing that it had already become an essential stop on any artist’s tour of the city.

·        The Torso was featured as a ‘must see’ in 18^th- and 19^th-century guidebooks to Rome, often accompanied by a string of asterisks or exclamation marks, depending on which system of grading was being used by the writer  

·        German Romantic writers, including Goethe and Schiller, were particularly taken by the Torso.  Schiller wrote about seeing a plaster cast of the sculpture in the   Antikensaal (Gallery of Antiquities) at Mannheim, in his Letter of a Travelling Dane (1785): ‘Here I stand before the famous rump, which was once dug out of the ruins of ancient Rome … This torso tells me that two thousand years ago a great person existed who was able to create such a thing …’  

·        Following Napoleon Bonaparte’s invasion of the Papal States in 1796, the Pope was forced to hand over a hundred top-class works of art to the French; the Torso was selected as one of these pieces (along with the Apollo Belvedere and the Laocoön), which further cemented its reputation as one of the best pieces of ancient art.  It was displayed in the Louvre from 1798-1815, widening its audience further, before being returned to Rome in 1816. 

·        In the 18^th century, students at the Royal Academy in London were encouraged to study the Torso.  In one of his lectures, Joshua Reynolds said that it retained ‘the traces of superlative genius …on which succeeding ages can only gaze with inadequate admiration.’  James Barry told his students at the RA that the Torso was ‘in a class of its own’; as a young man, visiting Rome in 1766, he had painted a self-portrait in which he and two friends were engaged in painting the sculpture.      

     James Barry, Self-Portrait with Belvedere Torso in Background, 1766 (National Portrait Gallery)

·        Winckelmann, whose influential judgements were plagiarised in many guidebooks, viewed the Torso as ‘a work which is the most perfect of its kind’, one of the greatest surviving pieces of modern art (we should perhaps remember that many of the most impressive Greek statues only came to light long after his death in 1768, so he was working in a restricted field compared to what we have available to us now).  He compared the statue, in its damaged state, to the trunk of an ancient oak tree which has been felled and stripped of its branches.  

 ·        Modern artists have been influenced by the Torso as well; Rodin, a keen collector of Classical art            (as shown by the 2018 British Museum exhibition on the subject) definitely channelled the Torso            in his Thinker

Not everyone was blown away by the Belvedere Torso.  The French writer Stendhal admitted to being a bit underwhelmed by it – he definitely didn’t experience ‘Stendhal Syndrome’ (palpitations and swooning on exposure to great works of art).  The point is, though that he was all too aware that he should feel impressed and moved by the Torso, and that if he didn’t respond in that way it was somehow his fault for not studying it for long enough, or for not having sufficiently refined sensibilities. 

Who is it?

The Belvedere Torso represents a mature, muscular male figure, with a heavily-incised inguinal ridge around the pelvis, sitting on a rock which is covered by an animal skin.  Fragments of the animal’s head can still be seen on the left thigh, suggesting that it was the skin of a big cat, possibly a lion or a panther.

There have been many suggestions regarding the identity of the figure, some of which see his seated position as a sign of dejection:  Ajax contemplating suicide (sitting in front of the sword on which he is about to fall?)  Polyphemus the Cyclops (who was blinded by Odysseus) and Philoctetes (the Greek warrior with the festering foot – the result of a snake bite – who was abandoned on the island of Lemnos by the Greek forces en route to Troy). This painting of Philoctetes by the Irish artist James Barry, uses the pose of the Belvedere Torso.

 

                             James Barry, Philoctetes on the Island of Lemnos (1770)

Here, however, we will look in more detail at two of the most convincing suggestions - one with a long pedigree and one more recent.

The heavy musculature of the seated figure, combined with the possibility that he’s sitting on a lionskin, means that Herakles has long been regarded as a strong candidate – although there is a lot of argument about which part of his story is being represented here.  Winckelmann decided that it showed the deified Herakles resting on Mount Olympus after completing his Labours: ‘It is no longer a body which has still to fight with monsters and destroyers of peace; it is that which has been purified  from the dross of humanity.’  Winckelmann saw this as the perfect version of Herakles’s body, as if he had been fed on ambrosia and nectar, rather than mortal food; he said that even Hylas (Herakles’ younger male lover, beguiled to his death by a group of water-nymphs) never saw him looking this buff.  One idea which became particularly influential in the late 18^th century was the suggestion that it showed Herakles caressing his divine wife Hebe, goddess of youth and female cupbearer of the gods; the British sculptor John Flaxman created a sculpture of Herakles & Hebe which reconstructed the Torso as a seated Herakles, with the skin of the Nemean Lion across his lap, being poured a drink by his semi-naked wife. 

                           

                                      John Flaxman, Herakles & Hebe (Picture credit: Michael Loizidis, Twitter)

An intriguing suggestion by Professor Bert Smith (Oxford University) is that the Torso isn’t actually that of a human, but of a satyr, one of the priapic nature-spirits who hang out with Dionysos the wine-god.  Earlier Greek artists (for example the painters of red-figure Athenian vases) tended to emphasise the bestial attributes of satyrs: their horse-ears, horse-tails, snub noses and permanent massive erections.  In Hellenistic art, however, the depiction of satyrs changed, making them look much more human – and often very ‘ripped’, like the Barberini Faun in the Glyptothek in Munich.  The Torso has a hole in the small of its back, which would make sense as the place where the satyr’s tail was attached.  Rather than a Heraclean lion-skin, the figure could be sitting on a panther-skin, associated with Dionysos and his satyr followers.  The rock support also suggests a figure associated with nature and the outdoors (rather than a figure reclining in a palace) – and satyrs were believe to inhabit remote, wild places.

                                                          Barberini Faun, Glyptothek, Munich

In particular, it’s suggested that the Torso might represent one of the older satyrs, Marsyas.  Marsyas, in Greek mythology, came to a sticky end after challenging Apollo to a music competition, and was flayed alive for his hubris (there are a disturbing number of ancient statues and paintings showing Marsyas hung up to receive his punishment).  The Torso, however, may show a seated Marsyas teaching a young boy, Olympos, to play the flute; a wall-painting from Herculaneum shows this scene, suggesting that the painting may have been based on a well-known statue.  

                  Torso of a Satyr, Roman AD 100-125, Musée Rodin, Paris, once owned by Rodin

                                        Note the panther-skin and the human appearance

It’s easy to get complacent about Greek sculpture when you see it through the medium of photography, or even plaster casts, but there is something undeniably special about being in the presence of the original works.  In 2015 the Vatican Museum loaned the Torso to the British Museum for their Defining Beauty exhibition, focusing on the ways in which Greek artists presented the human body.  The layout of the exhibition ensured that the Belvedere Torso was the final piece seen by each visitor – and for me at least, the most powerful.  When confronted by the original Torso I was struck by the sheer massiveness of it.  With the head, the seated figure would be over six feet tall – so if it were to stand up, it would dwarf the human viewer.     

It’s easy to see why such an imposing yet damaged sculpture became an icon to the artists and poets of the Romantic Movement, an aesthetic which valued melancholy overgrown ruins above intact contemporary buildings.  They saw the Torso, like the ruins of Rome itself, as encapsulating the rise and fall of the Classical world, and its continuing intrusion into our world.  

Where to See It

 Vatican Museum, Rome  (the original marble sculpture)

 Ashmolean Museum Cast Gallery, Oxford  (plaster cast)

 Crawford Art Gallery, Cork (plaster cast from Canova’s collection)

 Royal Cast Collection, Copenhagen  (plaster cast)

 Museum für Abgüsse Klassischer Bildwerke, Munich  (plaster cast)

References & Further Reading

Frances Haskell & Nicholas Penny, Taste & the Antique (Yale University Press,1981)

Ian Jenkins, Defining Beauty: The Body in Ancient Greek Art (British Museum Press,2015)

 R R R Smith, Hellenistic Sculpture (Thames & Hudson, 1991)