Rome, early 19th century, After the Antique

Marble, on a circular marble socle

49 cm. / 19 ¼ ins high, overall

PROVENANCE:

Private collection, Suffolk, England

This fine neoclassical bust of Socrates is based on an ancient portrait of the Greek philosopher from the Villa Albani, Rome (inv. no. 1040), which was discovered in 1735 in the grounds of a villa in Tusculum, near Rome.

The Albani Socrates was subsequently acquired by Cardinal Allesandro Albani (1692-1779), described as the most ‘enthusiastic and spendthrift of eighteenth-century Roman art patrons’, for his villa-museum (now the Villa Albani-Torlonia) on the Via Salaria. Presumably due to its relatively late discovery in the eighteenth century, there appear to be very few marble copies of the Albani Socrates from the late eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, with most modern busts of the philosopher being based on another ancient portrait in the Capitoline Museum, Rome (Sala dei Filosofi, inv. MC0508).

A plaster cast of the Albani Socrates, in the collection of the National Galleries, Scotland (acc. no. Albacini.40), was made in the late eighteenth century by the sculptor and restorer Carlo Albacini, whose Roman workshop was active between 1770-1813 and whose vast collection of plaster casts were sold by his son and assisstant, Filippo Albacini (1777-1858), in 1838. A lost marble based on the Albani bust is also known to have been carved in the Roman workshop of the Danish Neoclassical sculptor, Bertel Thorvaldsen (1770-1844), circa 1805-06, although this was also more likely to have been a herm-shaped bust, like the original.

It is probable, therefore, that the present bust was carved in a Roman workshop in the early nineteenth century, possibly by a sculptor in the circle of Carlo or Filippo Albacini. The manner of carving, plastic modelling of the facial features and lightly-polished matt finish of the surface are all compatible with the severe, Hellenising style of sculpture present in Rome in the early nineteenth century, which marked the final phase of the Neoclassical movement begun by Antonio Canova.

Socrates (c. 470-399 BC) was born in Athens a decade after the Persian Wars ended, at a time when the city was becoming the military, economic and intellectual superpower of Greece. The son of Sophroniscus, a stonemason, Socrates did not write any texts himself and his ideas and systems of thought are known mainly through contemporary Greek writers, most notably his student Plato. The question-and-answer approach Socrates takes to addressing abstract ideas or subjects in Plato’s dialogues is known as the Socratic method. As recounted in Plato’s Phaedo, in 399 BC Socrates was tried by the Athenian government, who accused him of impiety and of corrupting his young followers. He was found guilty and given the choice of renouncing his beliefs or of committing suicide by drinking hemlock, choosing the latter.

RELATED LITERATURE:

Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique. New Haven, 1982, p. 63-68; Gisela Richter, The Portraits of the Greeks. London, 1965, p. 13, pl. 21; Edgar Bowron and Joseph Rishel (eds), Art in Rome in the Eighteenth Century, exh. cat., Philadelphia Museum of Arts, Philadelphia, and MFA, Houston, 2000, pp. 225-26

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