Marble bust of Socrates, Italian, 19th century

Rome, early 19th century, After the Antique
Marble, on a circular marble socle
49 cm. / 19 ¼ ins high, overall

PROVENANCE:
Private collection, Suffolk, England

This fine neoclassical bust of Socrates is based on an ancient portrait of the Greek philosopher from the Villa Albani, Rome (inv. no. 1040), which was discovered in 1735 in the grounds of a villa in Tusculum, near Rome.

The Albani Socrates was subsequently acquired by Cardinal Allesandro Albani (1692-1779), described as the most ‘enthusiastic and spendthrift of eighteenth-century Roman art patrons’, for his villa-museum (now the Villa Albani-Torlonia) on the Via Salaria. Presumably due to its relatively late discovery in the eighteenth century, there appear to be very few marble copies of the Albani Socrates from the late eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, with most modern busts of the philosopher being based on another ancient portrait in the Capitoline Museum, Rome (Sala dei Filosofi, inv. MC0508).

It is probable that the present bust was carved in a Roman workshop in the early nineteenth century, possibly by a sculptor in the circle of Carlo or Filippo Albacini. The manner of carving, plastic modelling of the facial features and lightly-polished matt finish of the surface are all compatible with the severe, Hellenising style of sculpture present in Rome in the early nineteenth century, which marked the final phase of the Neoclassical movement begun by Antonio Canova.

Socrates (c. 470-399 BC) was born in Athens a decade after the Persian Wars ended, the son of Sophroniscus, a stonemason. Socrates did not write any texts himself and his ideas and systems of thought are known mainly through contemporary Greek writers, most notably his student Plato. The question-and-answer approach Socrates takes to addressing abstract ideas or subjects in Plato’s dialogues is known as the Socratic method. As recounted in Plato’s 'Phaedo', in 399 BC Socrates was tried by the Athenian government on the charge of corrupting his followers. He was given the choice of either renouncing his beliefs or of committing suicide by drinking the hemlock; Socrates chose the latter, making him one of the great martyrs of philosophy and freedom.


RELATED LITERATURE:
Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, 'Taste and the Antique'. New Haven, 1982, p. 63-68; Gisela Richter, 'The Portraits of the Greeks'. London, 1965, p. 13, pl. 21; Edgar Bowron and Joseph Rishel (eds), 'Art in Rome in the Eighteenth Century', exh. cat., Philadelphia Museum of Arts, Philadelphia, and MFA, Houston, 2000, pp. 225-26