Ένα κλασικιστικό ανάγλυφο του 19ου αιώνα

Abstract

This article attributes to a Greek sculptor, and specifically to Georgios Vroutos (1843-1909), a marble classicising relief in the Benaki Museum on the subject of Perseus and Andromeda. The relief was once in the ownership of the collector Konstantinos Karapanos (1840-1914) and was donated to the Museum by Apostolus Argyriades. The making of copies and variants of ancient sculptures was common practice throughout the 19th century, and the Perseus and Andromeda in the Benaki Museum is such a work. Its creator, the sculptor Georgios Vroutos, who was a contemporary and possibly an acquaintance of Karapanos, studied at the Accademia di S. Luca in Rome under the strict classicist sculptors Adamo Tadolini and Filippo Gnaccarini, favourite pupils of the famous Italian sculptor Antonio Canova, and he was Professor of Plastic Arts at the Athens School of Art from 1883 to 1908. A prolific sculptor, he moved within the ambit of ancient Greek sculpture, to such a degree that a visitor to his studio wrote: "He seeks the ideal stamp of beauty in an imitation of the beauties of nature, applying -very rightly- the lines and the immutable principles of the Greek concept of the Beautiful. His exhibited works, the Twelve Gods, the Hours and Night, the Achilles and Paris pre-eminent among them, remind the viewer of the workshop of an ancient sculptor". He soon became established in Athenian society, especially after his marriage in 1887 to Maria Kotzia, the daughter of Nikolaos Kotzias, Professor of the History of Philosophy at Athens University. He exhibited in Greece and abroad and was honoured with prizes. The Benaki Museum relief has great stylistic affinities with Vroutos' idiom -in particular the figure of Perseus resembles his Ares, and that of Andromeda his Science. For this relief Vroutos draws not on an ancient classical work, but on the Roman marble relief of Perseus and Andromeda in the Capitoline Museum and a marble relief of the same figures on a sarcophagus. He operates "like a plagiarist", making an eclectic choice of features, as with all copiers. The work suffers from an overall chilliness, an intense theatricality in the stance and gestures of the figures, a fussy, exaggerated handling of the drapery folds, and an empty verbosity in the narration of the myth. In spite of this the sculptor's ease in handling his materials and in developing the subject matter is immediately apparent.