Circular Altar with Bucrania and Garlands

Roman art

This sculpture was selected in 1619 for use as a base for the sculpture group Aeneas and Anchises in the Palazzina Pinciana and was, according to Italo Faldi, reduced by a fifth of its volume by the stonecutter Giuseppe di Giacomo so that it would sit better against the wall. The circular altar is decorated with three bucrania and two garlands of oak leaves and acorns intertwined with hanging ribbons. The delicate sculptural quality and accurate rendering of the acorns and leaves date the sculpture to the Augustan period.

Object details

Commentary

This circular altar, which is resting on a plinth and a cornice of lanceolate leaves, has a shaft decorated with festoons of oak leaves and acorns, held up by bucrania. The sculpturally described foliage is intertwined with hanging ribbons called vittae, which start from bows above the animal heads. Between the horns are chains with large links that decorate the forehead and then come down along the sides.

A document dated 1619 discovered by Italo Faldi reports that the altar was chosen for use as a base for Bernini’s sculpture group of Aeneas and Anchises in the Palazzina Pinciana (ASV, Archivio Borghese 4174, year 1619: Faldi 1953, p. 146, doc. V). To adapt it for this use, the altar was modified by the stonecutter Giuseppe di Giacomo, who might have made the vertical cut that removed a fifth of the sculpture’s volume, allowing it to sit better against the wall. The scholar Herrmann-Fiore argues instead that this reduction dates to the nineteenth century, since a late eighteenth-century drawing by C. Percier shows the altar still perfectly cylindrical (Percier, Parigi, Bibliothéque de l’Institut, ms. 1008, f.32, no. 60).

In 1650, Manilli described the sculpture in its current location, Room II (room of Apollo and Daphne), on the south-east wall: ‘the round pedestal that supports the group is ancient, in white marble, with two festoons and three bull’s heads’. Montelatici, in 1700, and the eighteenth-century inventories (ASV, Archivio Borghese 421, p. 76, 1725; ASV, Archivio Borghese 1007, p. 67, 1762) confirm this use of the work until the late eighteenth-century display by Antonio Asprucci, when the Aeneas and Anchises group was moved, without the base, to the niche in the wall adjacent to the chapel, while the altar, still in its original location, was used as a base for the sculpture of Three Sleeping Putti (inv. CLXXXIV), as attested by a drawing by C. Percier, datable to 1786–91. Lastly, Antonio Nibby reported in 1832 that the altar had been moved to Room I, as a base for the Portrait Statue of a Woman (inv. LXVI), during the nineteenth-century reorganisation.

Stylistically, the delicate, detailed rendering of the leaves and acorns is comparable to the interior decoration of the enclosure of the Ara Pacis, thus indicating a date in the Augustan period.

Giulia Ciccarello