Displacing the Antique

Art in America, Dec, 1998 by Edith Schloss

Looking like nothing so much as sets from Fritz Lang's Metropolis or Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times, the conglomeration of boilers, conduits, vents, catwalks and gauges in the end came to serve as the incongruous background for conferences, concerts, lectures and other cultural events. For the past year, gleaming white antique statuary has stood before the dark gray elephantine masterworks of the industrial revolution, set off by specially designed panels painted a weak blue with a greenish cast, like the color of hospital corridors.

The Capitoline discoveries date from the end of the last century and the beginning of this one. During the prosperity which followed the unification of Italy, aggressive urban renewal and new construction destroyed large Baroque parks as well as whole medieval quarters. The amazing quantity of antique artifacts which came to light in the digging literally became an embarrassment of riches. Since existing collections already filled Roman baths and churches, some of this new wealth went to cellars and storehouses (where many pieces still languish to this day), some of it was put on display by the Fascists on the Cello Hill in a municipal antiquities museum (works from which now are on view at the newly restored Palazzo Massimo, which opened last June), but the major part went to the Palazzo dei Conservatori on the Capitoline Hill. Today this Capitoline collection predominates at Montemartini.

On the ground floor of the plant--called the "Hall of Columns" because it has a host of reinforced concrete pillars holding up the engine and boiler halls above--the most prominent exhibit is an assembly of Roman portrait busts from the Capitoline.

The pitiless detail of portrait sculpture makes it the most original of all Roman art forms. This is where all questions of Greek influence can be laid aside. Until recently it was conjectured that Roman marble sculptures, portraits excluded, were copies of Greek bronzes. But no original Greek bronzes exist to prove this. What is thought more likely by today's scholars is that the Romans, in love with the Greek spirit, did their best to emulate Greek art, to re-create it for themselves. The works in both the Altemps and the Montemartini collections, when not actually by Greek hands, probably are variations on Greek themes by admiring Romans.

But the sharp realism of the portrait busts is acutely Roman. Greek faces are idealized and generic, the Roman portrait is scarily specific. Even if the heads have been mutilated by time, their features are of a truth that is stunning. Crafty, ironic, bright or blunt, old or ugly, nothing has been spared. They are never bland. These wily men and their stern women gazing stoically out at. you could easily be mistaken for today's power mongers, for Washington politicians, New York Mafia bosses. Il Togato, the statue of a patrician in a toga, proudly stepping forward with the busts of his father and his grandfather in his hands, is particularly arresting.

Upstairs in the huge Boiler Hall, the emphasis is on the treasures from Imperial pleasure parks and gardens. The fronds on vases and other decorations are so luxurious that you want to touch them. It is here that you meet familiar friends from the Capitoline: the gracefully turning Sitting Girl; the young woman poet or muse standing thoughtfully, wrapped in the folds of her shawl; and the little Esquiline Venus, thought by some to be Cleopatra because of the cobra on her vase, standing defenseless before a turbine.