The Centaur Marsyas (Furietti Centaur)
Bartolomeo Cavaceppi (Rome c.1716 - Rome 1799)
Category
Art / Sculpture
Date
1765
Materials
Plaster, paint
Measurements
1450 x 1005 x 495 mm
Place of origin
Italy
Order this imageCollection
Shugborough Estate, Staffordshire
NT 1271312
Caption
Following the discovery and excavation of ancient Roman statues in Italy in the 1700s, collectors across Europe became increasingly keen to acquire copies. Artists developed casting techniques in plaster that allowed classical marble sculptures to be copied at scale. These plasters gained popularity as art objects in their own right, and were displayed in galleries and country houses as a way to reference the remarkable skill in design and proportion of classical art. A pair of marbles known as the ‘Furietti Centaurs’ (AD 117–138) were discovered at Hadrian’s Villa outside Rome in the 1730s and displayed for the first time at the Capitoline Museum in that city in June 1765. These two plaster copies by Bartolomeo Cavaceppi (1716–99) are among the earliest known casts of those classical sculptures and were acquired by Thomas Anson (1695–1773) for his house at Shugborough, Staffordshire. The mythical creatures known as centaurs were half-human, half-horse, and these sculptures represent the young centaur Nessus holding a club and lionskin, and the old centaur Marsyas with his hands bound behind his back.
Summary
Plaster, The Centaur Marsyas (a 'Furietti Centaur'), Bartolomeo Cavaceppi (Rome 1716 - Rome 1799), 1765, after the antique. A painted plaster cast after the Hadrianic grey marble sculpture excavated by Giuseppe Furietti (1685–1764) at Hadrian's Villa, Tivoli, in 1736; one of a pair known as the Furietti Centaurs (Musei Capitolini, inv.scu. 656 and 658). This cast, produced by Cavaceppi in Rome roughly thirty years later, depicts the 'old centaur' Marsyas, with hands bound and torso arced, a nebris (deer skin) hung from the left shoulder. On the sculptural support beneath Marsyas' horse abdomen hang two castanets in low relief. The front edge of the plaster base is inscribed APICTEAC. KAI ΠΑΠΙΑC / AΦΡΟΔΕΙCEIC, after the antique signatures on the original marble by the artists Aristeas and Papias of Aphrodisias (Anatolia, Turkey). Mounted a wooden rectangular pedestal base with beaded borders, painted to simulate marble. Paired with NT 1271313, the 'young centaur' Nessus.
Full description
Thomas Anson’s (c. 1695-1773) important sculpture collection at Shugborough was formed mostly in the last decade of his life and included archaeological artefacts, marble copies and plaster casts of celebrated antique statuary. Anson was in his mid-late 60s when he inherited a fortune from his younger brother the Admiral George Anson who died in 1762. Vastly enriched, he set about filling Shugborough with an array of sculpture and luxury goods – including Corsican goats and wheels of Parmesan – to live out the rest of his years in a manner ‘good and pleasing’. A founding member of the Society of Dilettanti, Thomas Anson had completed a Grand Tour and travelled to Egypt in his youth. He was a man of taste with a keen connoisseurial eye and a love ‘for the Art of [the] Sculptor’ (SRO D615/P(S)/1/6/2). Presumably because of his age, Anson engaged agents in Italy to form a collection for him, much like his contemporaries Charles Townley and Henry Blundell. From 1765 to 1771 Anson commissioned the British Consul to Leghorn (Livorno) Sir John Dick (1719-1804) to acquire sculptures on his behalf. Letters preserved in the Staffordshire Records Office (SRO) document the to-and-fro between patron and agent and provide a valuable sense of the particularities of Shugborough’s collection, which was dispersed in a sale of 1842. For Anson Sir John bought – en bloc – an entire collection of antiquities from a bankrupted Leghorn merchant, sourced various decorative objects, and brokered the services of two of the finest dealers in Rome: the renowned sculptor-restorer Bartolomeo Cavaceppi (1716-99) and the London-born sculptor and sometime employee of Cavaceppi, Joseph Nollekens (1737-1823). In a letter postmarked December 1765, Sir John writes: ‘Cavaceppi...has some Excellent Copys, ie: the two Centaurs of the Furietti Palace the Apollo at the Villa Medici the Faun at the Capitol, the 12 Caesars &c I realy [sic] flatter myself if You wanted anything that he has...I could obtain them cheaper than any one, altho [sic] he is rather dear. I know he wishes to oblige me’. Carved of highly-prized bigio morato, the spectacular Furietti Centaurs were excavated at Tivoli in 1736 but had been hidden away for decades in the palazzo of Giuseppe Furietti (1685–1764), the cardinal-antiquary who excavated them. The Centaurs were coveted by Benedict XIV from the moment of being unearthed, but Furietti refused to give them up, and it was only until his death in 1764 that they were finally secured for the papal collection. Cavaceppi, the favourite of Cardinal Albani, the Pope, and the British aristocracy, restored the originals and made copies of them before they were mounted in the Capitoline Museum, Rome, where they remain today. It was, however, Nollekens (1737-1823) who actually acquired the ‘Casts of the two famous Centaurs…Cast for the first time’ for Anson, albeit for a steep price ‘according to the Vallue of Plasters in Rome’ (SRO D615/P(S)/1/6/3). He was assured that his patron ‘would not be against’ the investment, as he would be the first collector in England to own the pair. Anson displayed his large and varied collection of sculpture in rooms at Shugborough, in the gardens and inside James ‘Athenian’ Stuart’s replica Grecian monuments erected around the park.
Provenance
Purchased in 1766 by Thomas Anson from Joseph Nollekens, and thence by descent; transferred to the National Trust in 1960, in part-payment of death-duties to the Treasury, following the death of Thomas, 4th Earl of Lichfield (1883-1960).
Marks and inscriptions
Base, front edge: APICTEAC. KAI ΠΑΠΙΑC / AΦΡΟΔΕΙCEIC
Makers and roles
Bartolomeo Cavaceppi (Rome c.1716 - Rome 1799)
References
Cavaceppi 1768: Raccolta d'antiche statue busti bassirilievi ed altre sculture restaurate da Bartolomeo Cavaceppi scultore romano, Rome, 1768 Haskell and Penny 1981: Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique, The Lure of Classical Sculpture 1500 - 1900, New Haven and London, 1981, 20 Picόn 1983: Carlos A. Picόn, Bartolomeo Cavaceppi: eighteenth-century restorations of ancient marble sculpture from English private collections, exh.cat. Victoria & Albert Museum, London, 1983 Coltman 2004: Viccy Coltman, 'Thomas Anson's Sculpture Collection at Shugborough: ''Living good and pleasing'' or ''much taste a turn to Roman splendour'', Sculpture Journal, XII, 2004, pp. 35-56. Coltman 2009: Viccy Coltman, Classical sculpture and the culture of collecting in Britain since 1760, Oxford, 2009