Study after an Antique Fountain

Author: Surya Stemerding

A classical Roman statue of Silenus, the teacher of the wine god Bacchus, is on a pedestal pouring water into a large vase from a leather waterskin. The statue and the vase, which is a neo-Attic krater, also called the Vaso Torlonia, are now in Villa Albani in Rome.^[1]

The lavish washes create a dramatically heavy contrast that is typical of Giulio Romano’s pen drawings. The free interpretation of the physical statue in Villa Albani is remarkable. Silenus has been elongated, and thus looks less squat and more human. The foliage wreath on his head has been replaced by horns, and his tree-stump support has been omitted. Vinti (1995) had already remarked upon Romano’s repeated and insouciantly free approach to the ‘copying’ of classical sculptures.

The provenance of the Silenus statue, which formed a fountain with the well-known Vaso Torlonia, can be traced back to 1532, when Maarten van Heemskerck (1498-1574) drew it in the garden of Cardinal Paolo Emilio Cesi (1481-1537).^[2] The same composition, with the statue on a pedestal beside the vase, can be seen in a drawing by Francisco de Holanda (1517-1585).^[3] The composition of the statue and vase was altered at some stage in the 1540s. Ulisse Aldovrandi (1522-1605) described the group in 1550, when it had evidently been given a new central position in the sculpture garden of the Cesi family.^[4] His description of a ‘faun’ standing in a vase matches depictions of the group after 1550. A 1581 engraving by Pieter Perret (1555-1625) shows the new constellation,^[5] which can also be seen in drawings in the Codex Coburgensis, the Codex Cantabrigensis and a sketch by Willem Panneels (c.1600-1632) after Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640).^[6]

The Cesi collection was dispersed towards the end of the sixteenth century, and for a long time both vase and statue vanished from sight. It was not until the eighteenth century that they were both bought by Cardinal Alessandro Albani (1692-1779). However, a drawing by Joachim von Sandrart (1606-1688), a print of which was made in 1675 by Richard Collin (1626-1698), reveals where the statue of Silenus had been in the seventeenth century.^[7] The engraving is part of the Galleria Giustiniana, to which Sandrart contributed, and the inscription above the print states that it was made after the statue in the Roman collection.^[8] At that moment statue and vase had evidently not been reunited, and instead the print shows Silenus combined with a reclining lion and installed in a niche.

In Boston there is an identical version of the Rotterdam drawing.^[9] While the Rotterdam drawing is attributed to Romano, the Boston version is given to Girolamo da Carpi (1501-1556) on the evidence of its stylistic features.^[10] It looks flatter than the Rotterdam sheet due to the less pronounced shadowing. Moreover, it has fewer spontaneous, expressive lines. It is probably a drawing that Da Carpi copied after Giulio Romano, an artist whom he greatly admired and whose work very clearly inspired him.