Italian, Florence or Rome, circa 1600

Alberto Colzi collection, Florence;

Acquired from the above, private collection, Florence.

This powerful all'antica portrait of a beardless man with a shaved head and stern gaze is derived from Roman models from the Republican period or the early Empire. From the Renaissance to the 19th century, it was considered to be a portrait of Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus, known as Scipio Africanus (236 – 183 BC). In the early 20th century, it was hypothetically associated with representations of priests of Isis, but to this day, there is still no consensus on its identity. During the Renaissance, it was established that Pliny was the inventor of the myth that Scipio had introduced the ritual of daily shaving to Rome. In fact, he was referring to Scipio Aemilianus, the adopted grandson of Scipio Africanus. In any case, when this bronze was cast, the face was considered to be that of the consul and skilled Roman military strategist, whose name went down in history for his decisive action at the end of the Second Punic War, during the capture of Carthage.

In the 16th century, the heroic figure of Scipio, an exemplum of military and moral virtues, became extremely popular among Roman and Florentine aristocratic families. Ulisse Aldrovandi, in Le Antichità della Città di Rome (1556), was the first to recognise the hero of the Punic Wars in this model, of which he counted five ancient examples in Roman collections. In the 1562 edition, Aldrovandi describes in the Roman palace of Lorenzo Ridolfi, grandson of Lorenzo the Magnificent, a "Scipione Aphricano col busto vestido, & abbottonato su la spalla: ... E questa testa, clave & ha la veste ornata di oro; e sta sopra una base de la medesima felice " (A. Boström, op. cit., pp. 166-67). We thus learn that, at that time, a gilt bronze drapery was already associated with the ancient basalt head. At the end of the 16th century, we find it in the Roman palace of Federico Cesi; it was then engraved by Theodor Galle and published in 1598, then again in 1606, in llustrium imagines, ex antiquis marmoribus, nomismatibus, et gemmis expressæ, quæ exstant Romæ, maior pars apud Fvlvivm Vrsinvm (plate 49). The bust then passed into the Ludovisi collection, before taking the name of its last owner and becoming the Scipio Rospigliosi (Palazzo Rospigliosi, Rome). Other ancient and later examples of this model are known, including one at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris (inv. BnF 15-57), two in Rome, at the Capitoline Museum (inv. MC 562) and the Chiaramonti Museum, and another on deposit at the Dallas Museum of Art (inv. 36.1997).

In the last third of the 16th century, the great Florentine families placed numerous orders for bronze busts after the Antique. Correspondence from Lorenzo Ridolfi mentions a series of antique busts cast in Rome for his collection; Antonia Boström now attributes them to Ludovico Lombardo (1507 – 1575), Tullio's nephew. The inventories of Rodolfi's Florentine palace in Via Tornabuoni, drawn up in 1564 and 1570, confirm the presence of such busts (cf. ibidem, p. 174, note 18). As early as October 1550, several letters addressed to Ridolfi by his secretary in Rome, Mariotto Giambonelli, reported on the progress of the casting of three busts of Hadrian, Brutus and Scipio (cf. ibidem, pp. 160 and 170). Furthermore, still in Florence, we know that upon the death of Cosimo I de' Medici, in 1574, two bronze heads of Scipio, contemporary with the Ridolfi busts, adorned the bedroom of the Grand Duke of Tuscany in the Palazzo Pitti. They were then described as portraits of Scipio Aemilianus and Scipio Africanus. It should be noted that, as in the present example, the eyes of the two heads from the Medici collections are not incised (Museo Nazionale del Bargello, inv. 137 and 125).

The ‘Pseudo-Scipio’ type from which this bronze derives, characterised by a shaved skull, a wrinkled forehead, marked brow ridges and a determined gaze, is an example of the ‘uncompromising’ style inspired by Roman portraits. It is not a slavish copy of an ancient head, but should rather be considered a pure product of the humanist imagination, nourished by the rediscovery of classical models. Some versions feature scars, which for some are the marks of wounds received in battle, and for others are the distinctive signs of the priests of Isis. In other versions, such as Galle's engraving, Pseudo-Scipio's shaved skull is intact. In fact, no scars are mentioned in Renaissance writings; they only became a distinctive feature of Scipio Africanus in the second half of the 18th century, as confirmed by Ennio Quirino Visconti when he wrote in 1817: "Winckelmann was the first to notice this characteristic mark that distinguished the portraits of Scipio. He uses this as an argument in favour of those who regard these portraits as belonging to Scipio the Elder, whom history tells us was wounded in the Battle of Tessin. " (cf. F. Queyrel, R. Veymiers, op. cit., pp. 388-89). Prior to 18^th century, only baldness characterised the supposed portraits of this illustrious figure in Roman history.

The present head of ‘Pseudo-Scipio’ therefore belongs to this second group, without a scar, and finds its best comparison in a bust from the Borghese collections, dating from the late 16th or early 17th century, with a bigio antico head and a giallo antico bust (Galleria Borghese, Rome, inv. LXXVI). Like the Borghese bust, our bronze differs from other versions of the same subject in that it has a less rounded face, refined cheeks and a more pronounced jaw, physical characteristics that are reminiscent of the typology of portraits of condottieri. 

RELATED LITERATURE

F. Queyrel, R. Veymiers, « De « Scipion l’Africain » aux « prêtres isiaques » : à propos des portraits au crâne rasé avec cicatrice(s) », in Individuals and Materials in the Greco-Roman Cults of Isis Agents, Images, and Practices, vol. 187, Leyden-Boston, 2018, pp. 384-412 & pp. 1046-1057 ;

A. Boström, « Ludovico Lombardo and the Taste for the all’Antica Bust in the Mid-Sixteenth-Century, Florence and Rome”, in Large Bronze in the Renaissance, New Haven & London, 2003, pp. 155-179.