Last Laugh: The Wallace

Presenters

Elizabeth Bartman, New York Society

Abstract

Virtually overlooked by modern scholarship, the “rosso antico” head long known as a Laughing Faun (inv. S11) in London’s Wallace Collection is actually a centaur, an ancient replica of the young centaur found by Monsignor Giuseppe Alessandro Furietti at Hadrian’s villa in Tivoli in 1737. Its misidentification can be excused by the fact that the Wallace head was known almost a century before the centaur was even discovered, being part of a large cache of ancient sculptures sent from Rome to Cardinal Richelieu of Paris in 1633. This paper examines its disfiguring restoration in the early 17th century as well as a later treatment that darkened it and disguised its red stone: Was this a deliberate “bronzification” to evoke a bronze at a time when the metal ranked at the top of the hierarchy of sculptural materials? The question raises wider issues of fake patinas in restoration and early modern attitudes toward polychromy in ancient sculpture. The head’s quality and rarity also inspires speculation as to its provenance; connections between Richelieu and the powerful Barberini family, who promoted excavation and surveying at Hadrian’s Villa, hint that the Wallace centaur might have had more in common with Furietti’s centaur than simply a shared typology.

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