Gaddi Torso as seen in Uffizi Gallery

The marble Gaddi Torso displayed in the Classical Sculpture Room of the Uffizi, Florence,[1] is a Hellenistic sculpture of the 2nd century BCE.

Description

Its dynamic tension[2] and unusually refined modelling place it among sculptures of the Pergamene school.[3]

Formerly considered to be the torso of a satyr[4] when it was in the Gaddi collection, Florence,[5] the sculpture is now thought to represent a centaur straining against his bonds, a theme that was represented several times in Hellenistic art, as it was an emblem of civilized control of Man's baser nature.[6] The torso was very likely discovered in Rome, according to Giovanni Di Pasquale and Fabrizio Paolucci.[7] It was certainly already in the collections of the Florentine Gaddi family in the early 16th century, when Florentine artists and sculptors knew it. The sculpture appears on a pedestal, among other vestiges of shattered Classical pagan culture, in the Adoration of the Shepherds that was painted in 1515 by the Bolognese painter Amico Aspertini, now in the Uffizi.[8] Rosso Fiorentino's Deposition of the Dead Christ (Boston Museum of Fine Arts) has been inspired by careful study of the Gaddi Torso.[8] Its powerful, reaching and twisting musculature was a stimulus also to the young Michelangelo, whose mature style the Gaddi Torso seems to anticipate.[8] The Gaddi Torso remained with the Gaddi heirs until it was sold, still in its untouched fragmentary condition, to Leopold I, Grand Duke of Tuscany in 1778.[9]

In its earlier history the Gaddi Torso[10] may have been in the collection of the great early Renaissance sculptor of Florence, Lorenzo Ghiberti,[11] "who", according to Giorgio Vasari:

to say nothing of his own performance, bequeathed many relics of antiquity to his family,[12] some in marble, others in bronze. Among these was the bed of Polycretus[13] which was a most rare thing; a leg of bronze, of the size of life, with certain heads, male and female, and some vases, which Lorenzo had caused to be brought from Greece at no small cost. He also left the torsi of many figures, with a great number of similar things, which were all dispersed, like the property of Lorenzo, suffered to be destroyed and squandered. Some of these antiquities were sold to Messer Giovanni Gaddi, then 'Cherico di Camera';[14] and among them was the aforesaid bed of Polycletus, and some other matters, which formed the better part of the collection.[15]

In company with the Belvedere Torso in the Vatican collections, the Gaddi Torso was never restored by being completed, a fate undergone by most other fine Antique fragmentary sculpture.[16]

Notes

  1. ↑ Inv. no. 555
  2. ↑ Compare the central figure in the Rhodian marble group of Laocoön and His Sons.
  3. ↑ Giovanni Di Pasquale and Fabrizio Paolucci, Uffizi: the ancient sculptures, 2001, p. 20f.
  4. ↑ As by Augustus Hare, Florence, ch. II Appendix: "The Uffizi Collection": in the Hall of the Hermaphrodite, as this gallery was then called: "315. Torso of a Faun".
  5. ↑ Denys Eyre Lankester, The Arundel Marbles (University of Oxford, Ashmolean Museum) 1975, p. 9.
  6. ↑ Compare the Furietti Centaurs; Jon Van de Grift, "Tears and Revel: The Allegory of the Berthouville Centaur Scyphi" American Journal of Archaeology 88.3 (July 1984:377-88) esp. pp. 383, gives several literary instances of this theme in the context of the Furietti centaurs, notably Poseidippus, who complains in a poem of the Palatine Anthology of the power of love that drives him alternately "to tears and revel", and Roman references to the paradoxical nature of watered and unwatered wine, which espouse temperance and moderation.
  7. ↑ Di Pasquale and Paolucci, Uffizi: the ancient sculptures, 2001, p. 20f.
  8. 1 2 3 Di Pasquale and Paolucci 2001.
  9. ↑ Bober p. 318; Henry Edward Napier, Florentine History, From the Earliest Authentic Records to the Accession of Ferdinand the Third, Grand Duke of Tuscany (London, 1847) vol. VI, p. 154, noting, among "what remained of the Gaddi collection of pictures and statues, a beautiful Torso almost rivaling the magnificent fragment at Rome". (See Ferdinand III, Grand Duke of Tuscany.)
  10. ↑ Not to be confused with the torso of the famous but heavily restored Satyr in the Tribune of the Uffizi, already in the Medici collection in Florence by 1665 (Nicholas Penny and Francis Haskell, Taste and the Antique: the Lure of Classical Sculpture 1500-1900 1981, cat. no. 34 "Dancing Faun", pp 205-08).
  11. ↑ Julius von Schlosser reconstructed the collection of antiquities owned by Ghiberti, "Über einigen Antiken Lorenzo Ghibertis", Jahrbuch der kunsthistorischen Sammlungen der des AH Kaiserhauses 14 (1903) pp 125-59, "Der Torso der Sammlung Gaddi" p. 150ff, revised and included in Schlosser, Leben und Meinungen des florentinischen Bildner Lorenzo Ghiberti (Basel, 1941) pp 134-40, noted by Bober.
  12. ↑ His son, Vasari relates, was Bonaccorso Ghiberti.
  13. ↑ Polycleitus intended; the Letto di Poycreto is discussed by Phyllis Pray Bober, "Polykles and Polykleitos in the Renaissance: the 'Letto di Polycreto' " in Warren G. Moon, ed. Polykleitos, the Doryphoros, and Tradition (University of Wisconsin Press) 1995, p. 317ff.
  14. ↑ Thus Vasari. Phyllis Bober reports (Bober 1995, p. 39) that Gaddi was in fact a Dean of the Apostolic Chamber; she adds that Gaddi had a vigna in Rome near the Baths of Trajan, according to Pirro Ligorio's encyclopedia under "Policleto"; the Gaddi Torso if not bought from Ghiberti's heirs, could have been unearthed in Gaddi's own vigna.
  15. ↑ "Among these were the torso of a Satyr, a work of the best period of Greece... The first of these torsi is in the Florentine gallery" (note by G. Masselli (Florence, 1832-38), in Mrs Jonathan Foster, tr. (Giorgio Vasari) Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, (London, 1850) s.v. "Lorenzo Ghiberti" p 384.
  16. ↑ Numerous examples are discussed by Nicholas Penny and Francis Haskell, Taste and the Antique: the Lure of Classical Sculpture 1500-1900 1981, passim; the Belvedere Torso retained its original state in large part because of Michelangelo's admiration for it (Penny and Haskell cat. no 80. Belvedere Torso, pp 311-14).

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