Plates 2.21-2.22: Antique Bronze Figure
Object: The statuette depicted here is untraced. Thomas Hollis’s large and distinguished collection is now held to be somewhat uneven in quality. He left the collection to Thomas Brand, later Brand-Hollis, who in turn passed it on to the Rev. John Disney (Gill 2020). Much of it was then given to Cambridge University by Dr. John Disney (Jr.), the next heir, but this statuette is not recorded as having been exhibited or catalogued with the Disney Collection now in the Fitzwilliam Museum. It does not appear in the catalogue of the British Museum or any other institution known to have received objects from Hollis’s collection. By comparing evidence from Hollis’s Memoirs, the Latin letterpress account published with these plates, and the minutes of the Society of Antiquaries of London, it is possible to infer that the bronze was purchased by Hollis at Syracuse in 1753 during his Italian tour, and that it was identified as Flora at that time. This inference is discussed further below. The figure is identified as a Hamadryad in the Society’s minutes and as an “attendant” of Bacchus with male and female attributes in the letterpress account. Regardless of its origin, it seems highly likely that the figure was an eighteenth-century pastiche, passed off on Hollis by an unscrupulous dealer, a common occurrence on the Grand Tour.
Transcription:
[Both plates have identical captions.]
Along the left margin:
22 ¼ Inches
9 ½ Inches
Below the figure:
From an antique Bronze in the possession of Thomas Hollis Esq. F.R.S. F.S.A.
Bottom margin:
I. B. Cipriani del.
Sumptibus Societatis Antiquariorum Londini MDCCLXV
I. Basire sculp.
Translation:
Bottom margin [both plates]:
Drawn by I. B. [Giovanni Battista] Cipriani
Published by the Society of Antiquaries of London 1765
Engraved by I. [James] Basire
Original Explanatory Account: Click here to read the original explanatory account for Plates 2.21-2.22.
Preparatory Drawings Click here to see the Preparatory Drawings for Plates 2.21-2.22.
Commentary by Noah Heringman and Katherine A. P. Iselin:
Thomas Hollis (V) was elected a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London (SAL) on 15 December 1757 (SAL Minutes VIII.33v.), and exhibited numerous items at their meetings in the years that followed, but the bronze “fauness” depicted here attracted the most attention. Two weeks after it was shown on 2 February 1758 (42r.), Charles Rogers (1711-1784), a member of the society who was himself a collector, submitted a letter describing this figure as “very singular and extraordinary” and interpreting its meaning (44r-45r). The Council of the SAL echoed this judgment in commissioning the engraving six years later, deeming it “singular” (SAL Council Minutes I.80) and “very singular and curious” (I.112). Neither Rogers nor John Taylor (1704-66), who wrote the letterpress account accompanying the engravings in 1765, nor Hollis himself (as far as we know) raised any doubts about the figure’s authenticity. It is notable, however, that both Rogers and Taylor struggled to find classical analogues for the figure and supported their interpretations mainly with extensive literary quotations, many of them on the theme of venerem facile (easy sex/pleasure) that they associated with satyrs, nymphs, and the cult of Bacchus.
Indeed, no parallel representations from antiquity are known to us. Instead, the statuette is an amalgamation of ancient mythological and visual sources. Eighteenth-century commentators refer to the figure in several ways (as Flora, a Hamadryad, a satyr, or an attendant of Bacchus), and the imagery also draws on other mythological beings. The masculine head is no doubt related to representations of Pan/Faunus or satyrs/fauns, who were depicted with both human and goat attributes. The Greek god Pan originated in Arcadia and was associated with the outdoors, fertility, and shepherds. Satyrs were not deities, but mythological beings associated with Dionysus or Bacchus. Both Pan and satyrs/fauns had goat horns and legs. Satyrs and sileni, both considered “wild men” and conflated at some point in the sixth century BCE, also had insatiable sexual appetites, and are frequently depicted in art pursuing or assaulting nymphs or maenads (mortal female followers of Dionysus). The ears on this figure do not resemble goat ears, however, and may recall instead the horse’s ears associated with satyrs and sileni before they assumed their goat-like form in the Hellenistic period.
From the neck down in front, the statuette is largely feminine. Muscular shoulders end abruptly in tendrils of hair, and the breasts feature curls of hair between them. Below this, the skin looks like a tree covered with ivy. Knots in the “wood” are intentionally placed to draw connections with the navel and the pubic region. However, on the back the figure is more humanlike, with discernible buttocks and no leaves. Even so, more knots appear throughout. The legs taper downward and terminate on a base with root-like tendrils rather than feet. The shape is reminiscent of a herm, though without the erect phallus. It is more likely to be a term, or terminal figure, which is a tapered pillar with a bust, often a faun or other rustic character. Such architectural elements developed during the Renaissance and continued to appear in classically inspired architecture and furniture in subsequent centuries. Fauns and satyrs had specific iconography within Greek and Roman art that is unlike this statuette: they were depicted with a masculine head, arms, and torso, but featured goat horns and legs, and were frequently ithyphallic. For a comparison, see the bronze tripod of ithyphallic satyrs from the House of Julia Felix (Naples Archaeological Museum 27874), excavated in 1755 as Hollis was returning from the Grand Tour.
The base features a sort of hybrid face as well, incorporating human and bestial elements which also appear to draw from Greek grotesque masks with the open mouth. However, again, they are unlike anything surviving from antiquity. The accompanying letterpress account also notes that the base is neither contemporary with the figure nor of the same style. Significantly, Taylor attributes the base to Michelangelo, appealing to “the opinion established over time” rather than any direct evidence. It is difficult to accept this sculptural base as the work of Michelangelo for this reason, and it seems much more likely that both the figure and the base were produced by anonymous modern makers, perhaps in emulation of ancient works.
One analogue for a sexualized androgynous figure would be The Hermaphrodite, a second-century CE Roman marble sculpture by Polycles (Haskell and Penny 1981, 234-236). Known since the early seventeenth century and duplicated both in antiquity and the early modern period, this almost life-sized sculpture shows the deity Hermaphroditos lying down. The back of the figure looks feminine, but the front shows breasts and a penis, although some early modern reproductions did not include the male genitals. Although Hollis’s statuette is not affiliated with the son of Hermes and Aphrodite, the inclusion of both masculine and feminine characteristics in these two works is suggestive. It would have been difficult to ignore the eroticism associated with such sculptures, as the art unearthed in the excavations at Herculaneum and Pompeii (of which Hollis gave first- and second-hand accounts at the SAL) often featured nude figures or even explicit depictions of sexual acts. Antiquarianism itself had an erotic component, not only through the nude figures depicted in the art of antiquity, but also through the act of possessing and consuming it. The Society of Dilettanti, originally formed in 1734, explored this connection further (Redford 2008). Though Hollis was not a member, he did share a strong commitment to the left-libertarian (radical Whig) politics linked with libertinism and sexual experimentation by (among others) Francis Dashwood (1708-1781), a founder of both the Dilettanti and the loosely affiliated Hellfire Club (Kelly 2009).
Rogers identifies Hollis’s figure as a hamadryad, noting that the “Form of [this] Deity [was] hitherto unknown” (SAL Minutes VIII.44r), and compares it to the Roman bronze lamps recently engraved for Vetusta Monumenta (Plate 2.18). Among ancient Greek sources, however, both Athenaeus (Deipnosophistae 3.78b) and Antoninus Liberalis (Metamorphoses 32) suggest that the hamadryades (“together with trees” in Greek) were all female nymphs and neither writer mentions human male or goat characteristics (Athenaeus 2006, 436-37; Celoria 1992, 91). The head, therefore, seems not to fit with Rogers’s identification. Taylor identifies the figure as a signum pantheum—a figure bearing the attributes of multiple divinities—citing the second-century BCE inscription (CIL 06. 00100) that contains an early reference to this term. Taylor, however, interprets the figure as being most closely identified with Bacchus. This is likely because of the satyr head and the ivy on the bottom of the figure, but overall the iconography does not fit with any known Bacchic scenes or figures.
The closest thing to this figure mentioned in Hollis’s extensive Memoirs is a purchase he made in Syracuse in 1753 during his Italian tour: “a small but very beautiful antique statue of the goddess Flora quite perfect” (Blackburne et. al 1780, 39). If it was the same figure, Hollis himself must have been uncertain about the identification, since two entirely different interpretations of his piece were offered by the SAL. A more direct link may be made to an appendix to Hollis's Memoirs that lists “some of the most principal specimens” in his collection. This list includes “a Panthea of most singular form, in Bronze, near two feet high,” but merely reproduces the explanatory account published with these prints (Blackburne et. al 1780, 808, 817). This instance suggests that Hollis may have found Taylor’s interpretation the most persuasive.
Thomas Hollis, the fifth person in his family to bear this name, was widely respected as an antiquary and a collector in his own day but is now better remembered for his radical Whig politics. W. H. Bond sums up the connections well:
Hollis donated many books, prints, and drawings to the SAL between 1756 and 1766, including several other works by Cipriani. Of these, one clearly matches Bond’s account of Whig “propaganda”: Cipriani’s portrait of the historian Catharine Macaulay (1731-1791), again engraved by Basire, and “encircled by a medal of Brutus” (SAL Minutes X.86; reproduced in Davies 2005, 61). Cipriani created pieces for and inspired by Hollis—such as portraits for Hollis’s Memoirs—and David Wilson notes that “Cipriani was also part of a group including Francesco Bartolozzi, James Basire and James McArdell, which designed and engraved the famous ‘Liberty Prints’ circulated by Hollis as a form of ‘libertarian’ propaganda, many of which prints also served as frontispieces for the books Hollis caused to be published and distributed” (Wilson 2004, 6).Thomas Hollis’s engagement with the fine arts and the practical arts was intense and complex both in degree and in motivation. At one level he approached the arts as a propagandist, using them to foster the spread and protection of his Whig ideals of civil and religious freedom; at another, as a sympathetic and generous patron of artists and craftsmen, forwarding both the aesthetic and commercial progress of his nation; at a third, as student, connoisseur, collector, and adviser to both artists and fellow-collectors; and at yet another, as a designer of professional ability to whom others could, and did, turn for assistance in dealing with practical and artistic problems. (Bond 1990, 78)
After his return from the Grand Tour, Hollis was active in several learned societies, including the Royal Society and the Society for the Promotion of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce. The interests of these societies overlapped to a considerable extent with those of the SAL. A case in point would be Hollis’s correspondence with Camillo Paderni, the superintendent of the excavations at Herculaneum, whom had met on his tour (and who was himself an honorary foreign member of the SAL from 1753). One letter from Paderni to Hollis, dated 28 June 1755, is preserved at the SAL, having been read both there (SAL Minutes VII.252) and at the Royal Society, which published an English translation of the letter in its Philosophical Transactions (Paderni 1755; Ramage 1992, 657-58). Hollis served as a liaison between the SAL and antiquaries based in Italy, reading further letters from Thomas Jenkins, Philip Stosch, Marcello Venuti, and William How at meetings between 1756 and 1766.
Hollis played a key role in the relatively brief surge of interest in Roman antiquities represented by Plate 2.17, Plate 2.18, and Plates 2.21-22. The comparison made to Plate 2.18 by Rogers, himself a connoisseur of Roman bronzes (and of old master drawings), is apt, because this plate depicts objects from the collection of Lyde Browne (1724/5-1787), who also fed the Society’s interest in Roman materials. In addition to Arthur Pond’s engraving of these Roman bronze lamps, published in 1757, Browne also commissioned an engraving from Basire of a Roman drawing by Cipriani, in this case of a bust of the empress Julia Pia [Julia Domna], in 1759 (SAL Minutes VIII.199). The older and wealthier Hollis, however, was especially generous and appears from many references in the minutes and council minutes to have been sincerely regarded as a benefactor of the SAL as well as a tastemaker.
Reception of the Figure and the Drawings by Cipriani
Born in Florence in 1727, Cipriani moved to Rome in 1750 and was a prominent artist working in the neoclassical style. In the heyday of the Grand Tour, he worked closely with British artists, eventually traveling to London in 1755 and establishing residency there, even marrying an Englishwoman, Ann Booker. Cipriani was significant presence in the English art world and a founding member of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1768. He worked in a variety of media as both an artist and designer, and was well-known for his neoclassical interiors.
Hollis and Cipriani met in Rome in the early 1750s and their working relationship lasted roughly fifteen years (Steinberg 2017, 162). Hollis hired Cipriani not only for drawings and illustrations (such as those for his Memoirs), but also to paint portraits of himself and his family. Hollis commissioned the drawings of the fauness in 1757. Shortly after this, Hollis gave the SAL a viewing of the statuette, which is referenced several times in the early months of 1758. According to the minutes for 2 February:
Just two meetings later, on 16 February, this "farther account" was given by Rogers, a frequent commentator on antique statues (Rogers et al. 1770), who may have had a chance to examine the statuette more closely in Hollis’s museum. Rogers’s description of the statuette is actually more detailed than the Latin account eventually published with the plates, and is worth quoting in full:An Antique Statue and Pedestal, in Bronze, was exhibited by Mr. Hollis for the Inspection of the Members. It was purchased in Italy, in the year 1753, by Mr. Hollis, who was then upon his Travels. It is thought to represent a Female Fawn; has several peculiarities belonging to it; is of the finest Greek Workmanship, and is in perfect preservation. Its height is two feet eight Inches. As it is probable that this Statue will be shortly Engraved, a farther account of it is defer’d till that Occasion. (SAL Minutes VIII.42r)
Rogers’s carefully chosen literary references are all of potential interest for interpreting the figure. Given its modern origin, the statuette’s “maker . . . could have had in mind” any number of classical authors (Taylor 1763, 2). Of all the suggestions by both commentators, Rogers’s comparison between the statuette and the famous transformation undergone by the nymph Daphne may be the most apt, as we can practically see the fauness’s skin turning into a “tender bark,” as Daphne’s did (Metamorphoses I.553). The hamadryades addressed in the Orphic Hymns, and in classical mythology, share a common origin with their individual trees, rather than having been transformed like Daphne—but it is clear enough that all the creatures cited here inhabit the same sylvan ecology. Rogers makes the point that no images of hamadryads are known from antiquity, though he or others who came in contact with Hollis’s bronze might have known of a hamadryad statue executed for Versailles by Louis Lerambert II in 1665, now lost, but documented in a 1774 drawing by Gabriel de St.-Aubin. Rogers’s suggestion that the figure functioned as a lamp, like the satyr in Plate 2.18, is less convincing.A Letter from our worthy Member Mr. Rogers . . . was read, describing the Elegant Bronze, or Female Faun, lately exhibited to the Society by Mr. Hollis, and giving his opinion as to the Design of the Artist, in this very singular / and extraordinary Production, and illustrating the same by particular passages and allusions of the Poets . . . . The Figure, he observes, represents a Woman, whose Body and Limbs, from the Breast downwards, are covered with a tender Bark, or, as Ovid expresses it on a Similar Occasion, duratur Cortice Pellis, whose skin is only harden’d into bark, with such Delicacy, that the Shape and joints are easily perceived through it; the Feet are fixed with twining Roots to the Base, and Ivy spreads itself up the Bark, perhaps to distinguish it to be that of the oak. As it is part of a Woman, and part of a Tree, the Artist, he thinks, might probably intend to represent under this complicated figure, an Hamadryad; and has thereby given us the perfect Idea of the Form of a Deity hitherto unknown; on which account, this Statue is of singular Value: for Mr. Rogers remarks, that tho’ the antients enumerate this Deity among other Sylvan Nymphs, it was but rarely represented by them; as neither Montfaucon nor any other Author he has met with, who has wrote of the Gods of the Gentiles, has given us a figure, or the particular Characters of it. Its budding Horns, fat Nose, picked Ears, and hanging Breasts, bear some Similitude to those of its Companions of the Woods, the Fauns and the Satyrs; and its jocund Countenance, conformable to the Character given the Hamadryads by Orpheus, in his Hymn to the Nymphs, κοῦραι Ἁμαδρυάδες φιλοπαίγμονες.1 The Workman instead of giving his Figure Hands and Arms, has terminated the Shoulders with the Shaggy Hair of a Goat; the Emblem of Wantonness; and Propertius Lib. II. EI. 25. V. 75, has called the Hamadryads kind and complying;
‘Quamvis ille suam lassus requiescat Avemam Laudatur faciles inter hamydryadas’.2
The word faciles here being accepted in the same Sence as the venerem facile of Horace. Lib. I. Sat.2.v.119. / By the Projection of the under Jaw, he conceives this Figure was probably intended for a magnificent Lamp; as we often find the Satyrs and Nymphs put to this Service by the Antients; of which kind, two Lamps have been lately published by this Society, from the Collection of our worthy member L. Browne, Esqr. (SAL Minutes VIII.44r-45r)
Hollis’s presentation of the Cipriani drawings is noted in the minutes for 20 April 1758:
Creation of the PrintsMr. Hollis presented Two most exquisite Drawings, the one a View in Front, the other in Profile, of the very singular and elegant Female Bronze Figure lately (vid.pag.42) exhibited by him to the Society. They were executed by Signr Cipriani, a Person famous in his Profession, in order to render them a more acceptable Present to the Society, in case the Figure should be deemed deserving to be ingraved by them, as they seemed to express a Desire of, when it was shewn to them; as also to give them this Testimony of his Respect, and Readiness to promote the Interests of the Society upon all occasions.
The Society very thankfully acknowledged their great obligations to their worthy Member for this fresh Instance of his Generosity and kind Intentions, and desired that the Council be acquainted therewith. (SAL Minutes VIII.60)
The Council of the SAL presumably was notified of Hollis’s gift at the time, but the engravings were only commissioned five years later. This delay reflects the disarray resulting from the death in 1756 of George Vertue, who made all but one of the first eighty-seven prints in Vetusta Monumenta. Plate 2.18, invoked by Rogers as a precedent, was engraved by Pond in 1757. James Green was appointed engraver to the SAL the same year, but finished only one engraving, Plate 2.19, before he died in 1759. Basire was appointed soon afterward, but only received his first commission in early 1761 and did not complete this commission, Plate 2.20, until April 1763. The proof of this plate had been submitted as early as January 1762 (SAL Minutes VIII.389) and although he had some additions to make, members of the Council must have realized that Basire would need more commissions from the SAL, and more timely payment, to make their work a priority.
Accordingly, on 2 December 1762 as Basire was slowly finishing his first commission, the treasurer recommended “that they would think of some Subject proper to be engraved, so as Mr. Basire may be kept employed” (SAL Council Minutes I.80). Basire’s position was tenuous for several reasons. Vertue had been a Fellow of the SAL and participated regularly in the process of deciding what objects should be engraved for Vetusta Monumenta. The SAL then decided that they would employ engravers on a contract basis in the future, and their lack of success in establishing a new relationship was compounded by a lack of interest in the print series among the leadership. The eight years between Vertue’s death and the appearance of the fauness plates saw the publication of only three new plates by three different hands. The plates reflect two distinct directions, one Roman and the other loosely medieval, but both tending to promote the prestige of individual collectors and their collections. The prints of Hollis’s statuette, duly commissioned in March of 1763, mark the transition from this period to a more productive phase during which Basire completed four more prints for the series, all on architectural subjects, between 1765 and 1768—only to be fired by the SAL before resuming his work again within a year, this time continuing without interruption until his retirement in 1796 (Goddard 2016, 135-36).
Discussion of Basire’s new commission in Council meetings—where most of the business concerning the Society’s prints and other publications took place after 1754—sheds light on their complex motivations for “keeping Mr. Basire employed.” The council did not hesitate to recommend “the curious Figure of the Fauness in [Hollis’s] possession” as a proper subject for Basire (SAL Council Minutes I.80), suggesting that Hollis’s offer had not been forgotten. His response, as reported on 17 March 1763, suggests that the honor was mutual, for he not only offered them the opportunity to engrave “whatsoever other Articles in his Cabinet” might interest them, but even extended the same offer on behalf of his friend, the fourth Duke of Devonshire, a noted collector (I.83). It was thereupon “Order’d, that Thanks be returned to his Grace, and to Mr. Hollis, for their obliging and condescending Behaviour,” and that Basire be “directed to engrave Mr. Hollis’s Faun . . . under the Inspection and Direction of Mr. Hollis” (I.84).
Wealthy connoisseurs played an outsize role during this transitional period, during which the Society’s nominal president, Lord Willoughby of Parham, was uninvolved in their activities, and John Taylor, who wrote the letterpress account in his capacity as director, did double duty as the vice president in charge. Whereas the previous director, John Ward, authored numerous accounts for Vetusta Monumenta during his tenure, Taylor only wrote the one. Willoughby died in January 1765, and the energy of the new president, Charles Lyttelton (Plate 2.28), is evident in the minutes of a Council meeting of 4 April 1765. At this meeting Basire’s proofs of the “Faun” or “Fauness”—both forms are used in these minutes—were delivered and at the same time three new subjects were put forward for Basire to work on, all reflecting Lyttelton’s scholarly interest in architectural history. The council “approved of” Basire's “proof prints of the very singular & curious Female Bronze” and directed him “to wait on Mr. Hollis” before printing off a substantial number “on a large & fine paper” (SAL Council Minutes I.112). The entry here anticipates some “Demand of the Publick” for these prints and recommends the addition of the account by Taylor (who obliged, but died the following year). The finished engravings follow Cipriani’s drawings closely. Basire received his fee of twenty-six guineas on 5 December (I.118).
Taylor’s account, based more on the drawings than the object, differs from Rogers’s earlier one in several important ways. To begin with, he takes the figure’s head as masculine, perhaps in part because of his overriding interest in ancient religious practice. He supports his interpretation of the figure as a signum pantheum [representation of multiple divinities] with evidence that is more documentary than literary: a Roman inscription apparently describing a votive statue. On this basis, Taylor argues that the figure derives from the worship of Bacchus, incorporating both male and female “attendants of Bacchus” (the head of a satyr and the breast of a nymph) as well as Bacchic symbols such as the ivy along the trunk.
Hollis’s Collection, its Legacy, and the Role of Forgeries
Hollis continued to be influential after his death, as he dispersed his collection both during his life and posthumously through his heirs. In 1757, he donated a quite a few objects to the British Museum (Gill 2020, 32), though many are of a rather low quality of production and condition. Of the roughly 30 bronze statuettes that Hollis gave to the museum, all are under 20 cm and each one depicts a recognizable deity such as Athena or Hercules; none of them matches the fauness. While the British Museum dates a handful of them to antiquity, most of the statuettes do not have a date listed in the museum’s online database, which suggests a recognition that they may be early modern forgeries.
Upon Hollis’s death in 1774, his good friend Thomas Brand (later known as Thomas Brand Hollis) inherited his collection. Brand Hollis, who had accompanied Hollis for much of his Grand Tour, continued to add to the collection (Gill 2020, 25-46). When Brand Hollis died in 1804, he bequeathed it, along with his Hyde estate, to his friend the Reverend John Disney, who subsequently commissioned Basire to engrave a painting of The Hyde by artist George Cuit (Gill 2020, 59). Disney’s son, also John, inherited the collection in 1816 and ultimately gave most of it to Cambridge University, where it has been housed in the Fitzwilliam Museum since 1850. The fauness statuette is not among the bronzes included in Disney Jr.’s 1849 catalogue, Museum Disneianum. Yet this catalogue and Caroline Vout’s research on the collection bring up some intriguing connections to this statuette. Adolf Michaelis, a nineteenth-century cataloguer of collections, referred to the Disneys’ collection as “trash rather than treasure” (1882, 159), a comment that likely refers to the lower quality items or even modern forgeries in the collection (and also aligns with the objects Hollis donated to the British Museum). The antiquaries, by contrast, regarded Hollis’s “Female Fawn” as being “of the finest Greek workmanship” (SAL Minutes VIII.42r). Hollis may well have commissioned the Cipriani drawings because this object, whatever its origins, was more finely wrought than other artifacts in his collection. At the same time, Hollis owned many other objects that were admired by eighteenth-century collectors, including Roman marble sarcophagi that the Fitzwilliam continues to display today (Vout 2012, 314). While the Hollis/Brand Hollis/Disney collections were not of superior quality throughout, they were by no means without value.
Even so, the Fitzwilliam and British Museums do not contain the entirety of these collections. In her analysis of the Disney collection, Vout notes that Disney Jr. “did not surrender all of the sculpture [to the Fitzwilliam]: some was retained by the family and sold at Christie’s in 1884 and 1885” (2012, 310; see also Gill 1990). She contrasts a bust of Minerva retained by Disney, apparently authentic, with a later imitation that he donated—perhaps “a sop for the one he retained,” as Vout puts it. She observes that both busts were purchased “by Thomas Hollis from dealers in Rome and were originally . . . admired artefacts in his collection” (310). This suggests Hollis had been duped at least once before. Indeed, forgeries were common in the antiquities trade, with “bronzes . . . of all others, most easily falsified” (Disney 1848, 2.xii). While Disney here refers to molds being taken from original antiquities, it seems far more likely that the fauness was the complete fabrication of a modern sculptor, from creation to production. One only needed to use the right patina to give it the luster of an ancient artifact! How and when the base was added is difficult to assess. Hollis may have purchased the statuette already attached, or they were joined after he acquired it. The “restoration” of antiquities was common during this period; artists might join disparate fragments of sculpture (regardless of whether they were originally part of the same object) or “improve” a fragment to make it more aesthetically appealing. A bust known as the nymph Clytie, originally part of Charles Townley’s collection and now in the British Museum, is one well-known example of a sculpture that was likely made in antiquity but heavily reworked in the eighteenth century (Cook 1985, 15). The addition of an ornate base for the fauness sculpture would have been an ideal way for Hollis (or the dealer) to display it. Additionally, the story of Michelangelo as its maker added more prestige to the object.
While restorations would not necessarily qualify as forgeries since deceit was not the intention, the fauness is unlikely to be part of this category due to its unusual imagery, which has no ancient parallels. Forgeries in the antiquities trade of the eighteenth century were not uncommon. Travelers on the Grand Tour purchased a wealth of souvenirs during their travels, seeking out both antiquities and early modern art and trinkets that evoked the local atmosphere. Unfortunately, many of them would return home only to be informed that the object they believed to be a genuine artifact was instead a modern creation. Several extant Grand Tour narratives from the eighteenth century warn others to be wary of dealers in Rome (Jones 1990, 132).
Even though this “antique” bronze figure was produced in the early modern period, Rogers was correct in describing it as a “very singular and extraordinary” work of art (SAL Minutes VIII.44r-45r), and his interpretation provides insight into eighteenth-century antiquarian views of classical mythology and art. In the early twentieth century, Gisela Richter remarked that the easiest way to spot a fake is by its stylistic characteristics, in that “the modern forger . . . hardly ever succeeds in keeping out of his creations a certain feeling of self-consciousness, which is totally foreign to the Greek spirit and immediately betrays its origin” (Richter 1915, xv). Our inability to connect the “Antique Bronze Figure" to any specific deity suggests that the maker was working in a context other than the ancient Mediterranean. Perhaps Rogers, Taylor, and the SAL also had an inkling of the statuette’s modern origin, as suggested by their repeated use of the term “singular” to describe it. Rogers’s reading of the figure as a hamadryad, “the Form of a Deity hitherto unknown,” has an affinity to the found text motif familiar from antiquarian fictions of the period, such as Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764). Taylor’s use of a very unusual Latin word to describe the “opinion” that the base was made by Michelangelo, inveteravit, might even be a knowing gesture toward Cicero’s famous speech in prosecution of Gaius Verres (In Verrem I.1). The “opinion increasingly talked about” [opinio inveteravit] here is a belief that the Roman court system has grown corrupt (Cicero 2006, 13); the test of this belief will be the verdict concerning Verres—a corrupt and wealthy governor who, like Thomas Hollis in 1753, went to Sicily and collected artworks there—or rather plundered them, as Cicero goes on to explain (In Verrem II.4).
There is a knowingness in these eighteenth-century accounts that is entirely worthy of the bronze figure’s knowing gaze. The eyes look boldly forward and the mouth seems opened not so much in laughter, as Taylor suggests, but in speech. The fauness tells a tale of the borderlands inhabited by eighteenth-century antiquaries and connoisseurs, an imaginative space that held together several spheres increasingly divided by Enlightenment “systems of nature”: the vegetable, animal, and human kingdoms; the male and female sexes associated with the two-sex model; and, within the human kingdom, religion, art, and sexuality. The earliest interpretation on record, classifying this figure as a “female faun,” is the simplest and perhaps also the most modern, since it seems to experiment with ideas of biological reproduction quite foreign to antiquity: might there not after all be offspring born from the well-documented couplings between nymphs and satyrs, and might it look something like this?
Notes
1. This Greek text from Orphic Hymn 51 could be glossed as “playful Hamadryad maidens,” or, in Jennifer Larson's translation, “girls joined with the trees, you delight in play” (Larson 2001, 268-69).
2. Rogers is slightly misquoting Propertius, Book II, Elegy 34, here as translated by A. S. Kline (2002): “Though he rests, exhausted, from playing his pipe, he’s praised by the loose Hamadryads.” The OED entry for hamadryad shows that the word has a rich literary legacy in English as well.
Works Cited:
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