Dreams Less Sweet Antiques

Description

Large pair of 19th Century Furietti Centaurs of the Villa Hadriana, after the ancient.

Bronze cast, with lovely green patina, on stone bases.

Probably Italian.

Striking & impressive decorative pieces.

The Furietti Centaurs (known as the Old Centaur and Young Centaur, or Older Centaur and Younger Centaur, when being treated separately) are a pair of Hellenistic or Roman statues in grey-black marble from Laconia (Greece) sculptures of centaurs based on Hellenistic models. One is a mature, bearded centaur, with a pained expression, and the other is a young smiling centaur with his arm raised. The amorini are missing that once rode the backs of these centaurs, which are the outstanding examples of a group of sculptures varying the motif.

The strongly contrasted moods were intended to remind the Roman viewer of the soul troubled in pain with love or uplifted in joy, themes of Plato's Phaedrus and Hellenistic poetry.

The pair were popular in the 18th century, as illustrations of centaurs that posed them as civilized patrons of hospitality and learning, like Chiron, rather than bestial half-animals (as at the Battle of the Centaurs). With their erotes, they were emblems of the joy of young love and the contrasting bondage of maturity to love, themes to which a Rococo audience would easily respond. But Ennio Quirino Visconti remarked on the Bacchic attributes of the Borghese/Louvre centaur, whose amorino is crowned with berried vine, to suggest that the forces in play were those of intoxication rather than love. Jon van de Grift, in examining the iconography of a pair of early Imperial Roman silver scyphi (drinking cups) embossed with motifs of centaurs ridden by erotes, part of the Berthouville treasure, notes that "the motif of an amorino torturing an old sullen centaur, usually within a lively Dionysiac procession, is encountered in Roman mosaics and Dionysiac sarcophagi he offers the Furietti centaurs as iconographic parallels.

Raised Arm H: 53cm / W: 38cm / D: 17cm + Arms Tied H: 45cm / W: 32cm / D: 16cm