Statuette of Asclepius restored as Zeus

Roman art

This statuette might be the ‘statue of Jupiter with a lightning bolt’ on a porphyry column with a Corinthian capital that Montelatici described in the second enclosure or one of the two ‘small statues of Jupiter’ that Manilli and Montelatici described in the Salone.

Smaller than life size, the sculpture depicts a male figure with a mantle draped around his legs and sides, enveloping the left shoulder and then coming down along the left arm, which is bent and held against the figure’s side. The only ancient parts of the sculpture are the torso and the drapery of the mantle around the loins and one the shoulder. The head, the raised right arm with the lightning bolt and the entire lower half are the work of a restorer and were aimed to make the statue a Jupiter. The iconographic type derives from Phidian models from the fifth century BCE, including the Dresden Zeus type, but is also often found in images of Asclepius. The latter might have been the source for the Borghese example, which is datable to the early Severan period.

Object details

Commentary

This statue, which is smaller than life size, portrays a standing male figure placing his weight on his left leg, while his left leg is bent. Based on the attribute of the lightning bolt, the figure can be identified as Jupiter. The figure is wearing a himation that is draped around his legs and sides and envelopes his left shoulder and then comes down along his left arm, which is bent and held against his side. The only ancient parts of the sculpture are the torso and the drapery of the mantle around the loins and one the shoulder. The head, the raised right arm with the lightning bolt and the entire lower half are the work of a restorer and were aimed to make the statue a Jupiter (as was the case for another similar sculpture, which is not on view, CCLII).

The iconographic type of a nude torso and a himation derives from Phidian models from the fifth century BCE, such as the Dresden Zeus type, the model for which dates to 440–430 BCE and for which there are numerous copies from the Hadrianic and Antonine periods (the Dresden sculpture might have come from Hadrian’s Villa; Canciani 1997, p. 433, no. 122). It is also often found, however, in images of Asclepius, to which we might be able to trace the Borghese sculpture.

The most famous image of the god of medicine, son of Apollo and Coronis or (according to other versions of the myth) Arsinoe, is the Amelung type, the model for which was created in the fifth century BCE by Argive sculptors active in Epidaurus, in the deity’s main shrine (there is a variant on this type in Room VI, CIC). In 293 BCE, when the city was struck by the plague, the Romans sent a legation to the Greek city to bring the sacred serpent, signum Aesculapii, to Rome as a remedy for the pestilence. The serpent chose the island in the Tiber as the site for the sanctuary of the god (Livy, History of Rome, 11.12–13; on the myth and the cult of the god in Greece and in the Roman world, see De Miro, Sfameni Gasparro and Calì 2009).

In Marion Meyer’s revised classification of the numerous types of statues and torsos attributed to the god of medicine, the Borghese statue is close to the London-Eleusis type, a variant, along with the Athens-Macerata type, of the Giustini Asclepius. According to Meyer, the archetype was a bronze created in Athens in about 380 BCE and reformulated in the second half of the century in the model for the Athens-Macerata and London-Eleusi types. In the latter, the mantle is draped horizontally beneath the belly button, with a triangle-shaped piece covering the belly (Meyer 1988, pp. 141–149; Berger 1990, pp. 208–209, type IIIb; Capaldi 2009).

Among the numerous known examples of the London-Eleusi type, the closest to the Borghese sculpture is the colossal statue from the Gymnasium of Salamis, on Cyprus (Holtzmann 1984, p. 882, no. 236). Technical and stylistic analysis suggests a date for the Borghese statuette in the early Severan period.

According to Moreno (Moreno, Viacava 2003, p. 90), the Borghese sculpture might be the ‘statue of Jupiter with a lightning bolt’ on a porphyry column with a Corinthian capital that Montelatici described in the second enclosure or one of the two ‘small statues of Jupiter’ in the early collection, predating the sale of antiquities to Napoleon Bonaparte, that Manilli and Montelatici described in the Salone, either the one on a porphyry column or the one on a red breccia column. 

Jessica Clementi