Ildefonso group
Ildefonso Group is the name of today in the Museo del Prado in Madrid preserved ancient marble double statue of Hadrian's time , that is from 1724 to 1839 in the courtyard of La Granja de San Ildefonso in Segovia was where it has its common today name. Its location is unknown, but it was first recorded in the first half of the 17th century as part of Cardinal Ludovico Ludovisi's famous collection of antiquities .
According to Johann Joachim Winckelmann , the double portrait depicts Orestes and Pylades , according to Gotthold Ephraim Lessing the personifications of sleep and death, Hypnos and Thanatos , and according to Ennio Quirino Visconti the Antinous leaning on his death demon . The latter interpretation may have been influenced by the fact that the originally headless left youth was completed by the sculptor and restorer Ippolito Buzzi in 1623 using an equally antique portrait head of Antinous. Also called Corydon , a shepherd, and the coveted him Alexis from the Eclogue II of Virgil , the group was interpreted. Today it is generally assumed that the young couple are the so-called Dioscuri Castor and Pollux ; however, their exact iconographic identity remains unclear.
The youth on the right holds a lowered torch in his right hand and carries another over his shoulder in his left, while the other, with his left arm around his companion's shoulder, seems to be looking at a circular disk in his right; Probably he pours a libation (libation) from a flat sacrificial bowl onto the garland-adorned little altar stone in the foreground, on which his companion is putting out the torch, a sign of death. Behind the youth with the lowered torch there is a small kore on a pedestal ; In addition to its static function (it stabilizes the torchbearer), it may serve as a further indication of a sacred context. The round object she holds in her hand has been interpreted variously as an egg or a pomegranate , and the Kore itself as Persephone .
What is striking is the orientation towards the Greek canon of forms of the classical period according to Polyklet and Praxiteles . a. shows in the ponderation . The youth on the right resembles in many elements the Doryphoros of Polyklet, while the posture of his companion on the left alludes clearly to the Apollon Sauroktonos of Praxiteles. The Ildefonso group is, so to speak, a pastiche of classical Greek sculpture, as it was popular at the turn of the times in the Roman Empire. The archaeologist and art historian Friedrich Hauser called this creative game with set pieces of the classical style "New Attic".
From the 17th century onwards, the Ildefonso group was often copied in different materials (marble, bronze, cast iron, porcelain), although the size also varied (the height of the original is 161 cm). So there are copies u. a. in the stairwell of Goethe's house in Weimar and not far from the Weimar City Palace on the Ildefonso fountain next to the entrance to the study center of the Duchess Anna Amalia Library . In Sanssouci Park , in Charlottenburg Palace and in the park of Neustrelitz Palace , replicas were also set up, as well as in France in the palace parks of Versailles and Sceaux . A copy can also be seen in London's Victoria and Albert Museum .
Modern artists were inspired by the ancient work to create full-length, plastic double portraits: the sculptor Johann Gottfried Schadow took compositional elements of the Ildefonso group in his double statue of the princesses Luise and Friederike von Prussia (1797; Berlin, Alte Nationalgalerie), his colleague Ernst Rietschel in his Goethe-Schiller monument in front of the German National Theater in Weimar.
Web links
- Othmar Rahm: The Ildefonsogroup in the Sanssouci Park in Potsdam. Thoughts while looking at the sculpture ( Memento from January 7, 2010 in the Internet Archive ). In: othmar-rahm.de
- So-called. Group of S. Ildefonso In: uni-goettingen.de