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| Giovanni Battista Piranesi Medici Vase 1778 etching Victoria & Albert Museum |
This Roman ornamental vase of carved marble was recorded at the Villa Medici in Rome during the 16th century. It was taken to Florence in the 18th century and displayed at the Uffizi, where it remains. The frieze of relief figures was confidently described for centuries as 'the story of Iphigenia', but modern scholars maintain that the figures are too heavily restored to be identifiable.
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| Stafano della Bella The Medici Vase studied by young Cosimo de' Medici 1656 etching Metropolitan Museum of Art |
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| Sèvres Manufactory Medici Vase 1813 copy - in porcelain Victoria & Albert Museum |
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| Sèvres Manufactory Medici Vase 1813 copy - in porcelain Victoria & Albert Museum |
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| Sir Joshua Reynolds Portrait of Anne Dashwood carved figure on stone pedestal from the Medici Vase 1764 oil on canvas Metropolitan Museum of Art |
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| Pompeo Batoni Portrait of John Talbot reduced version of the Medici Vase in background 1773 oil on canvas Getty Museum, Los Angeles |
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| Jean-Jacques Lagrenée Composition with the Medici Vase 1782 etching, aquatint Metropolitan Museum of Art |
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| Charles Errard Medici Vase ca. 1650 engraving Rijksmuseum |
"Three copies of the vase were made for the Bassin de Latone, Versailles, paired with copies of the Borghese Vase [below]. Copies, often paired in this way, were popular garden ornaments throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A full-size copy by Bartolini, in which lamps were lit, was placed in the orangery at Chatsworth in Derbyshire; there were sixteen large-size marble copies at Woburn in Bedfordshire by 1822; and there were as many smaller cast-iron ones at Alton Towers in Staffordshire (probably dating from a little later). Towards the end of the eighteenth century miniature versions became immensely popular in bronze, alabaster and biscuit. The status of the vase had hardly altered in the mid-nineteenth century when Blashfield in his catalog of terracotta reproductions listed it, together with the Borghese Vase, with the note that the two were 'the grandest Greek sculptural vases now in existence'."
In illustrations and in sets of copies, the two vases were often made to resemble each other more than they did in reality, for the sake of symmetry. With the public, they still retain some of their former allure, even though both are now slighted as late neo-Attic workshop products.
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| Charles Errard Borghese Vase ca. 1650 engraving Rijksmuseum |
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| Josiah Wedgwood & Sons Borghese Vase ca. 1780-1800 copy - in Jasperware Metropolitan Museum of Art |
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| Francesco Faraone Aquila Borghese Vase 1713 engraving Victoria & Albert Museum |
Part of the great reputation enjoyed by the Borghese Dancers (below) in their day was due to the admiration and advocacy of Nicolas Poussin in 17th-century Rome, who drew the figures for his own use and arranged for them to be cast in bronze and conveyed to Louis XIII.
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| Pietro Santi Bartoli Borghese Dancers mid-17th century engraving of marble relief panel Philadelphia Museum of Art |
"In 1645 this relief was recorded as in the Villa Borghese, but it seems to have been known in Rome more than a century before, parts of it being precisely imitated in the 1520s. On 27 September it was purchased, together with the bulk of the Borghese antiquities, by Napoleon Bonaparte, brother-in-law of Prince Camillo Borghese. It was sent from Rome between 1808 and 1811 and was displayed in the Musée du Louvre by 1820. ... Although far less noticed by travelers and no longer adapted for ornamental vases and chimney-pieces, the Dancers were among the very few reliefs of which casts were provided by the leading London plaster-cast merchant of the mid-nineteenth century, and today it is still copied on composition window boxes although the relief itself has been relegated to the reserve of the Louvre and has been considered since the late nineteenth century as poor quality neo-Attic work."
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| Nicolas Dorigny Curtius Flinging Himself into the Gulf ca. 1704 etching, engraving Philadelphia Museum of Art |
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| Curtius Flinging Himself into the Gulf Villa Borghese, Rome 17th century Decorative relief incorporating Roman sculptural fragments |
"This very high relief was mentioned in 1648 by a visitor to Rome as being on the outside of the Villa Borghese. In 1650 Manilli's guide to the Villa gave its exact location as the center of the southern facade overlooking the orange garden, high up between the second and third floors. It had almost certainly been there since 1623 by which date the Villa was virtually complete. During the 1770s when Prince Marc Antonio IV Borghese transformed the Villa it was brought inside the newly decorated entrance hall and placed high above the door facing the entrance."
The figures illustrate a well-known episode from legendary history concerning Marcus Curtius, who heroically flung himself and his horse into an abyss to save Rome. "The Borghese Curtius was noted and enthusiastically admired by most guides and visitors to Rome in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. ... Maffei's commentary praised the masterly carving, the heroic expression of Curtius himself and the extraordinary vitality and movement of the group as a whole. Appreciation reached a climax towards the end of the eighteenth century, and much attention was devoted to the psychological states of both horse and rider, which were sometimes seen as complimentary and sometimes conflicting." Viewers tended to assume the sculpture was as ancient as the event it portrayed, and had been made as a commemoration at the time. In fact, the horse is an ingeniously positioned Roman fragment from Hadrian's Villa and the rider is entirely modern.
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| Fratelli Alinari Villa Borghese Entrance Hall, with Curtius relief over doorway ca. 1880-95 photograph Rijksmuseum |