Statuette of a Molossian hound
Italian School
Category
Art / Sculpture
Date
c. 1800 - 1850
Materials
Bronze, Marble
Measurements
127 x 89 mm; 127 mm (L)
Place of origin
Rome
Order this imageCollection
The Argory, County Armagh
NT 565236
Summary
Sculpture, bronze; the Molossian dog; Italian, Roman, after the Antique; c. 1800-1850. A figure of a Molossian hound, an ancient breed from north-western Greece, the ancestor of the modem mastiff. This is a small copy in bronze of a marble sculpture in the Museo Pio Clementino in the Vatican, Rome. Another version of the marble is the celebrated ‘Dog of Alcibiades' in the British Museum, formerly at Duncombe Park.
Full description
A bronze statuette of a dog, half-seated on its hindquarters, looking upwards to its left, its ears pricked and expression alert, its teeth bared in a sign of warning. The dog’s tail curls round by its right hindquarters. Mounted on a rectangular giallo antico yellow marble base. The sculpture is a faithful reproduction of a marble statue in the Museo Pio Clementino in the Vatican, Rome, one of a pair of similar sculptures that guard the entrance to the Sala degli Animali (‘Hall of the Animals’) in the Vatican museums, a collection of around 175 sculptures of animal subjects (see NT 565249). The two dogs are Roman copies of a lost Greek bronze sculpture, which must have been famous, since no fewer than ten ancient copies in marble are recorded, more than for any other animal sculpture from the Roman world (Picon 1983, p. 82). They include another pair in the Uffizi, Florence, brought from Rome in the sixteenth century. However, the best-known is the version now in the British Museum (Picon 1983, pp. 80-83, no. 22; Angelicoussis 2002; Williams 2010), bought in around 1758-59 from the workshop of the sculptor and restorer Bartolomeo Cavaceppi (1716-1799) by the collector Henry Constantine Jennings (1731-1819). Because this example had a truncated tail, Jennings identified it as 'the Dog of Alcibiades', in reference to the story recounted by Plutarch of the fifth-century BC Athenian general and statesman. According to Plutarch, Alcibiades cut off the tail of his large and handsome dog, in order to give the Athenians something to gossip about other than himself. In fact the state of the tail of the British Museum dog, also known as ‘the Jennings dog’ and ‘the Duncombe Dog’ (after Duncombe Park, where it was displayed from 1778), is the result of damage or restoration. The fame of the sculpture was such that, after bringing it back to Britain, Henry Constantine Jennings, who eventually had to sell it to meet his mounting debts, quickly acquired the nickname ‘Dog-Jennings’. The dog is generally described as a Molossian hound, after a people known as the Molossi, who in classical antiquity lived in a region near the Arachthos river in Epirus, in north-western Greece. Their most famous king was Pyrrhus of Epirus (319/318–272 BC), whose experience of several battles won, but with unacceptably heavy losses, is the source of the modern expression ‘pyrrhic victory’. The hounds bred by the Molossians were famous in antiquity and are said to be the ancestors of modern breeds of mastiffs. They were particularly appreciated as fierce guard dogs. The base of the little bronze reduction of the Vatican Molossian hound is made from the same marble as that for the bronze reduction of the biga or chariot, another sculpture in the Vatican Museums (NT 565233). They well have been made in the same workshop, which evidently specialised in making small bronze reprodictions of antiquities for sale to visitors to Rome. Jeremy Warren November 2022
Provenance
By descent; Walter McGeough Bond (1908-86), by whom given to the National Trust in 1979.
Makers and roles
Italian School, sculptor
References
Picon 1983: Carlos Picon, Bartolomeo Cavaceppi. Eighteenth-century Restorations of ancient marble sculpture from English private collections, exh.cat. Clarendon Gallery, London 1983 Angelicoussis 2002: Elizabeth Angelicoussis, ‘Henry Constantine Jennings: a mad dog’, Journal of the History of Collections, 14, no. 2 (2002), pp. 215-23. Williams 2010: Dyfri Williams, ‘Dogged by debts: the Jennings Dog’, Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies. Supplement no. 104, Exploring ancient sculpture. Essays in honour of Geoffrey Waywell, (2010), pp. 225-244