THE RETURN OF THE GODS ... AND THE RETURN OF THE INCE BLUNDELL MARBLES

 

THE RETURN OF THE GODS … AND THE RETURN OF THE INCE BLUNDELL MARBLES 

Review of the ‘Return of the Gods’ exhibition at Liverpool World Museum

 Roman marble copy of Apollo Sauroktonos (Apollo the Lizard Slayer) by Praxiteles (the original statue was made c 340 BC)

In 1776, Henry Blundell of Ince Blundell Hall, Crosby, was invited on a trip which would change the course of his life – and provide an unexpected bonus for the people of Liverpool.  It was his friend Charles Townley, of Towneley Hall near Burnley (yes, the house does have an extra ‘e’), already a veteran of two Grand Tours, who suggested that Henry should accompany him next time he went to Italy.  Henry was fifty-two when he embarked on his first Grand Tour, which is a good reminder that this type of travel wasn’t just restricted to people in their late teens or early twenties.

Charles Townley had already built up a substantial collection of ancient sculpture (his collection formed the basis of the British Museum’s collection of Greco-Roman art), and Henry Blundell caught the collecting bug very quickly. As a late beginner, he kick-started his collection by buying in bulk, purchasing eighty pieces from one collection (the Villa Mattei) alone. As well as making three further Grand Tours (in 1782-3, 1786 and 1790), he also started buying up collections made by other British Grand Tourists.  As a Catholic (like many other Lancashire landowners, including Townley) he would have benefited from making connections in Rome which weren’t always open to Protestant Grand Tourists from Britain, and he would also have found it easier to secure export licences for the items he purchased.

Henry Blundell (1809), copy of a portrait by the American artist Mather Brown. Blundell would have been about 85 when this was painted. The copy of Trajan’s Column (smaller than the original) which he commissioned from the sculptor Bartolomeo Cavaceppi can be seen in the background (Liverpool World Museum)

By the time of Henry Blundell’s death in 1810, he owned 599 sculptures, 400 of which had been sold to him as ancient artworks – the others were contemporary pieces, including 18^th- century copies of Hellenistic and Roman sculptures. Once his massive sculpture collection outgrew his house, he built two new buildings, the Garden Temple and the Pantheon, to house it.   

 

                   Garden Temple (1790-92) & Pantheon (1802-05), Ince Blundell Hall

Henry Blundell’s collection remained intact at Ince Blundell Hall until 1959, when the house and its contents were offered to the National Trust; unfortunately, they could not reach an agreement (a great shame, as we are a bit short of National Trust properties on Merseyside), so the house was sold to the Augustinian sisters, a nursing order of nuns, for use as a nursing home. The sculpture collection (with the exception of the relief sculptures set into the walls of the two garden buildings) was given to the City of Liverpool by Blundell’s descendant, Colonel Sir Joseph Weld, and now forms part of the collection of Liverpool Museums.

 

Exhibition Layout

Although the Ince Blundell Marbles are the largest collection of Classical sculpture in the UK outside the British Museum, very few of them have been on permanent display in recent years, with the exception of some of the 18^th-century sculptures displayed in the wonderful Sculpture Gallery at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool.   It is therefore definite cause for celebration that the new exhibition at the Liverpool  World Museum, Return of the Gods, features over a hundred items from the collection.

 The new exhibition, curated by Chrissy Partheni, the Curator of Classical Antiquities at the Museum, is a visual treat: it’s beautifully-presented and the statues are lit in imaginative ways to show them off to their best advantage, particularly the spectacular Roman sarcophagus in the final room. The presentation is clever without being gimmicky: I particularly liked the projections of Heracles’s labours onto the floor, in the style of a mosaic, and the use of Pompeian wall-paintings as the backdrop to a display of busts of Roman emperors.

 The main section of the exhibition focuses on each of the Olympian gods in turn: Zeus, Hera, Ares, Apollo, Artemis, Dionysus and Athene, plus some more ‘exotic’ gods imported from other regions of the Roman Empire, such as Cybele and Isis (from Phrygia and Egypt respectively). Each god is represented by one or more life-size (or larger) statues from Blundell’s collection, with supporting material including Greek vases, statuettes and drawings.  Each section outlines the relevant god’s ‘superpowers’ (for example, Zeus’s ability to appear in the guise of various animals) plus a brief summary of a myth involving that god accompanied by an image from an Old Master painting – a good way of showing the reception of these myths. Information is supplied in little nuggets rather than big chunks and the presentation can be a bit reminiscent of a comic-book – the story of Kronos eating his own children, in a desperate attempt to ensure that they couldn’t overthrow him, is presented under the headline GULP!                

Although it’s probably fair to say that the exhibition is aimed at younger visitors –the video trailer describes Ares as ‘very buff’, comments on Apollo’s beautiful hair and describes Dionysus as ‘the god of having a good time’ – the layout and presentation make it clear and accessible for any visitor; the focus is on the artefacts themselves, particularly the awe-inspiring images of the gods, rather than on overwhelming the visitor with information.  For visitors who want to go deeper, there are useful timelines of Greek and Roman history, and a map of the Roman Empire at the time of Augustus, as well as a family tree of the Olympian gods (always a complex challenge to draw, given the level of incest involved). There’s a clear route through the various sections of the exhibition, with plenty of space round the key exhibits – the statues of the gods – so that you can admire or study them from all angles (one of the downsides of studying Classical sculpture from books or photos is that you don’t usually get to see statues from the back or the side, which are often the most interesting views). There are several benches if you want to sit and contemplate the statues, or if you just need a rest!  

Although the immediate scene-stealers are the statues of the gods, some of the smaller artefacts are also fascinating, including the terracotta body-parts which worshippers offered in temples of Asclepius, indicating which part of the body they were having problems with (I particularly liked the clay womb).  The section on Athene features a good selection of Panathenaic amphorae, the massive jars filled with olive oil (produced from trees descended from ‘the world’s first olive tree’, gifted to Athens by Athene herself) which were given to the winners of events at the Panathenaic Festival in Athens. Each jar had a black-figure image of Athene on one side and an image of the relevant event on the other side; the examples on show here include wrestling, running, throwing the javelin and the competition for rhapsodes, who had to recite chunks of the Iliad or the Odyssey from memory.

The ‘Death’ section which concludes the exhibition also includes some unusual material, including this corner from a sarcophagus lid (mid-2^nd century AD) with a Medusa-like face, apparently intended as a ‘terror symbol’ to drive away evil spirits and protect the dead. 

Another unusual piece is a seated stature of Serapis, the composite Greco-Egyptian god who was invented by the Ptolemaic rulers of Egypt in order to create a deity whom both the main groups within the Egyptian population could worship  (I always love the fact that Serapis became popular far beyond the boundaries of Egypt, with a statue of Serapis even being found in Roman Londinium).  Although the ‘Greek’ element of Serapis is usually seen as evoking the features and attributes of Zeus, here he has been syncretised with Hades, god of the dead, complete with Cerberus, the three-headed hound.

 

Mash-ups & Restorations: Henry Blundell as a Collector

By focusing on the gods as its main theme, the exhibition tends to skate over the role of Henry Blundell in building this collection of sculptures. There is an information panel about Blundell at the start of the exhibition, but as this is easy to miss (especially as it’s in the area where museum staff check your tickets), I felt that more could have been done to put the sculptures within the historical context of the Grand Tour. 

Given that many of the statues are heavily-restored, and that some of them are not perhaps the best quality (there is a particularly weedy sculpture of Dionysus), it might have been a good idea to use the statues to explore what the Grand Tour meant to a Lancashire landowner like Henry Blundell, and what owning all this sculpture said about you in the eighteenth century – although perhaps the curators felt that this issue had recently been addressed in the  Ince Blundell Marbles exhibition held at the Atkinson Art Gallery in Southport in 2016-2017, which focused on how a market in ‘restored’ statues developed in Rome in order to meet the desires of collectors who didn’t want to buy damaged or fragmentary sculptures. Sculptures might be extensively recut, or even cobbled together with other fragments to make a complete sculpture.    

From my perspective, at least, the most interesting aspect of the current exhibition is where we get tantalising glimpses of the histories of the statues themselves, including the ways in which they have been ‘restored’ or ‘improved’ by eighteenth-century sculptors such as Bartolomeo Cavaceppi and his pupil Carlo Albacini.

Portrait of the eighteenth-century sculptor and restorer Bartolomeo Cavaceppi (c 1794)  by Anton von Maron (Wikimedia Commons, picture credit: Sailko)

 Examples of their work can be seen in the statue of Athene, whose shield (embossed with Medusa’s head) was almost certainly added by Albacini, or the statue of Artemis created by Albacini by combining 127 fragments from several ancient sculptures – surely the ultimate example of an eighteenth-century ‘mash-up’.  

Left: Roman statue of Minerva (Athene), restored by Carlo Albacini.

Right: Statue of Diana (Artemis) reconstructed by Carlo Albacini from ancient fragments’ the Conservation Department at Liverpool Museums have managed to identify 127 different pieces.

Statue of Juno (Hera) from the 3^rd century AD, holding a pomegranate added in the 16^th century

Some of these restorations, such as the addition of a pomegranate to as statue of Hera in the sixteenth century, only serve to raise more questions. Presumably the intention here was to turn the sculpture into a figure of Demeter or Persephone, due to the association of pomegranate seeds with the Underworld; not only did the ‘uncountable’ pomegranate seeds represent eternal life, but they were the only food consumed by Persephone after her abduction by her uncle Hades. The fact that she had eaten the food of the Underworld is what condemned her to spend six months of every year down there – hence the seasons.  

If you want to see more of the collection …

There are curatorial tours of the exhibition which focus on Henry Blundell as a collector, but these only appear to run on Tuesdays at 11am; if you’re interested you can book on line for a cost of £13 (which includes entry to the exhibition itself). Another option, if you’re interested in Henry Blundell as a collector, would be to combine a visit to Return of the Gods  with a visit to the Sculpture Gallery at the Walker Art Gallery (it’s virtually next door, and entry is free) to see some of the 18^th-century pieces from Blundell’s collection, including several of Albacini’s copies of famous Classical busts.   

 

Copy of an ancient bust of Alexander the Great, in the Capitoline Museum in Rome, by the 18^th-century sculptor and restorer Carlo Albacini (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool)

This is the ‘Piranesi Vase’, sold to Henry Blundell as a Roman vase, but mostly 18^th-century. Piranesi, now better known for his etchings of Roman ruins and imaginary prisons, had a side-hustle in creating ‘Roman vases’ to sell to Grand Tourists, combining fragments of ancient sculpture with a lot of modern infill.  This particular example shows a Bacchanalian procession, with the pine-cone handle at the top also alluding to the worship of Dionysus (aka Bacchus), as he traditionally carried a wand topped with a pine-cone (Walker Art Gallery)

Like the Piranesi Vase, this relief sculpture, Girl in front of a Round Temple. was sold to Henry Blundell as a Roman work but is now regarded as a clever eighteenth-century forgery. The caption in the Walker Art Gallery explains that the different elements have been ‘borrowed’ from various genuine ancient sources, with the girl being copied from the Borghese Dancers relief (now in the Louvre) and the round temple being copied from a relief in the Uffizi showing the Temple of Vesta. It has been suggested that this is one of Bartolomeo Cavaceppi’s creations, but this is unlikely given that even his close friend Johann Winckelmann (the man who effectively invented Classical art history) was taken in by it.  

Joseph Allen, George Bullock, Sculptor, with a Bust of Henry Blundell (1808) (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool)

Final Thoughts

To sum up, the exhibition is definitely worth a visit, especially if you’ve got kids or you’re a teacher looking to run a school trip. On the day I went there was a Year 6 group visiting the exhibition and they were clearly having a brilliant time. They especially enjoyed the ‘spooky bit’ , consisting of atmospheric watery projections in a darkened space, which is intended to represent crossing the River Styx (if anyone reading this is old enough to remember the 1980s, it reminded me of the opening credits for Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected).  I have however decided to spare you the photo of me dancing in this section, as I look like Mary Beard on acid.   

Whilst under-17s get in free, I do have some reservations about the museum’s decision to charge adult visitors an entry fee (£8) for an exhibition which repackages material drawn entirely from the collection of Liverpool Museums (mostly from the World Museum, with some additional material from the Walker Art Gallery). Given that the focus of the exhibition is on the Greco-Roman gods, rather than on Henry Blundell as a collector, some loan exhibitions from other institutions would have been welcome and would have justified the entry fee. Borrowing objects from other museums might also have avoided the need to pad the exhibition out with additional material such as the section on Roman Dining, or the section on the Roman Emperors from Augustus to Septimius Severus (31 BC – AD 211). This is not to say that these sections aren’t interesting – there’s a great collection of imperial busts -  or that they aren’t beautifully-presented, but their connection with the ‘gods’ theme feels a bit tenuous. Perhaps one way of dealing with this would have been to put more focus on the idea of deifying Emperors, and the concept of the Imperial cult.  

Hall of the emperors, including Trajan, Hadrian, Marcus Aurelius, Commodus and Septimius Severus

 

While this temporary exhibition is very welcome, it perhaps highlights the need for a more permanent exhibition devoted to the Ince Blundell Marbles – a collection so extensive that there would be the potential to regularly change the display. It’s a shame that such an extraordinary collection, the largest of its type outside London, should spend most of its time in storage. 

‘Return of the Gods’ runs from 28 April 2023 to 25 February 2024 at Liverpool World Museum.  Entry fee is £8 for adults, with no charge for visitors under 17.