Day 193 - Caesar and siren

October 2, 2019

Gallery 534 is the Velez Blanco patio, a space I've passed by innumerable times but scarcely ever entered. (I do have clear memories, however, of a temporary exhibit of old violins held in the patio  that Mama and I went to years ago; I specifically recall our noting that a number of the violins were owned by physicians, presumably as investments but also, I'd like to think, because they were amateur violinists.) I had always assumed that Velez Blanco was the name of the family that owned the castle from which the patio was taken. But this turns out to be wrong. Velez Blanco was actually an area of eastern Andalucia that was a Moorish stronghold. One Don Pedro Fajardo y Chacon was a key figure in the Reconquista, and a royal decree gave him title over the region. He built a castle there between 1506 and 1515 and hired itinerant stonemasons from Lombardy to decorate the courtyard  with marble carvings of urns, trellises, masks, griffins, coats of arms, and and other design motifs.  (Interesting to think of the Italian stonemasons who decorated the entrances of many brownstones on the Upper West Side at the beginning of the 20th century.)

The patio had an eventful history en route to the Met. In 1904, the owner of the abandoned castle sold the marble fittings, which were acquired in 1913 by George Blumenthal, who used them to decorate his New York town house. In the 1940s, after his demise, that house, too, faced the wrecker's ball. Some 2000 marble blocks were then brought to the Met and reassembled there in 1964.  So the Velez Blanco ornamentation has outlasted not just one but two residences that it adorned.

The patio now holds Italian sculptures from the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries; again, the numbering of these galleries makes little sense in terms of chronology or country of origin. It also seems odd to have Italian works placed in a Spanish courtyard. But then, I think of those Italian stonecutters and, more generally, of the widespread influence that Italian Renaissance style exerted and its appeal to humanists, of whom Don Pedro was one.

A number of the works are of interest.   Perhaps the most famous sculptor represented in the gallery is  Gian Lorenzo Bernini, whose marble sculpture of a faun being teased by children is quite a marvel of   torquing forms and balance -- and was completed when Bernini was only 18. There's also a bronze copy of the spinario. And there's a large marble statue of a laurel-crowned nude male standing in a marked contrapposto position and holding up a stringed instrument. I take the figure to be Apollo, but instead, it's Orpheus.

Two sculptures especially capture my attention.  One is an almost life-size  marble bust of Julius Caesar by Andrea Ferrucci, a Florentine who worked in both Florence and Naples and executed this work around 1512-1514. The caption says that the bust is based on a classical model. I like it in part because it is so skillfully done  - I note the lines in Caesar's forehead, the elaborate folds of the cloak draped over his shoulder,  the gaping mouth and fierce eyes of Medusa on Caesar's breastplate - but mostly because Caesar is so damned handsome, with his long, straight nose, high cheekbones, and penetrating gaze. He doesn't look young, but he appears to be  at the height of his powers, sexual and otherwise. Of course, who knows what Caesar really looked like, but this image is certainly an arresting one.

The second sculpture is that of a siren, about three feet high and cast of bronze in Rome around 1570- 90.  It strikes me as more than vaguely erotic (although her pudenda are replaced by gills), and as very, very weird.  But I read that the siren, crowned and holding her two tails, was a symbol of the Colonna family. Why would they want to be represented by the figure of a nude woman with her legs (okay, tails) spread wide apart?  I do a bit of research - unusual for me - and learn that this work may have topped a stone column celebrating the victory of Marcantonio Colonna over the Turks at Lepanto in 1571. That would help explain the sea theme, although apparently sirens holding their tails also decorated Romanesque capitals centuries earlier. I can only assume that the way I'm "reading" the sculpture has little to do with the way it was viewed many centuries ago.