[Statue of a Julio-Claudian prince on horseback]

The plate depicts the marble statue of a youth on horseback on display in British Museum  (The Great Court), museum number 1864,1021.2. The young man is naked except for his military cloak (paludamentum).

The equestrian statue was discovered in Rome in the 16th century, restored by Giacomo della Porta, and has been on display at Palazzo Farnese since 1652. It has been identified as an equestrian statue of Augustus, likely based on ancient historical sources that mention an equestrian statue with which Augustus, when he was just twenty years old, was honored by the Senate. It was transferred to Naples in the 18th century, along with the rest of the Farnese Collection, at the behest of Charles of Bourbon, following the extinction of the Farnese dynasty; it was eventually sold by Francis II, King of Naples, in 1864 and ultimately ended up abroad.

“The boy's facial features and hairstyle resemble those of members of the Julio-Claudian dynasty of Roman emperors. When the sculpture first entered the Museum it was identified as a portrait of the emperor Caligula or Gaius (AD 37-41) in his youth. Later it was thought that the head might not belong to the body, and that the body itself dated to the mid-later second century, representing, perhaps, one of the imperial princes of that period. During recent cleaning, however, it was observed that the marble of the head of the youth and the unrestored parts of the horse were the same. This has raised once more the possibility that horse and rider belong and indeed represent a Julio-Claudian prince.” (British Museum curator’s comment)

Etching, printed on contemporary laid paper, with margins, in perfect condition.

Plate taken from the famous Raccolta di statue antiche e moderne: data in luce sotto i gloriosi auspicj della ... Papa Clemente XI. / da Domenico de Rossi; illustrata colle sposizioni a ciascheduna immagine di Pavolo Alessandro Maffei. In Roma nella Stamperia alla Pace con Privilegio del Sommo Pont. e licenza dè Superiori l'anno MDCCIV.

In 1704, the largest collection ever assembled of prints depicting ancient Roman statues was published in Rome, a work that would remain a milestone in the genre. Compared to its most important predecessor, the Segmenta nobilium signorium et statuarum by the French painter and engraver François Perrier (1638), the Raccolta, published by Domenico De Rossi, with an erudite commentary by Paolo Alessandro Maffei (1653-1716), was distinguished above all by the presence, alongside the Nobilia Opera, of famous modern sculptures from the 16th and 17th centuries, preserved both in Rome and Florence.

The engravers who worked on the copper engravings were almost all French, and the undertaking was considered a collective effort led primarily by the publisher, the most important in Baroque Rome. Not all the names involved, however, were of the same caliber and prestige, and above all, they were not all active in the same years: two of the lesser-known engravers, Claude Randon (died 1679) and François Andriot (d. 1704), had worked together, on behalf of Charles Errand, director of the Académie de France à Rome, on Giovanni Pietro Bellori's Vite de' pittori, scultori e architetti moderni, published in Rome in 1672. The involvement of these two engravers suggests that the Raccolta arose from an undertaking started, but then abandoned, in the 1670s by Charles Errard, with the collaboration, presumably, of Bellori himself.

Among the artists who worked for the De Rossi printing house for this luxurious repertoire of statuary, the name of François de Poilly also appears (six plates), who, unlike Andriot and Randon, was a highly successful and extraordinarily prolific engraver who died in Paris in 1693. Randon and Poilly, therefore, had certainly been dead for some time when Domenico De Rossi published the Raccolta, and it is possible that Andriot had also already died, or was no longer in Rome. Among the other engravers whose signatures appear on the plates of the Raccolta, are some of the protagonists of the printmaking active in Rome at the beginning of the century: Francesco Aquila (fifty-two plates), Nicolas Dorigny (thirty-one plates), the Flemish Robert van Audenaerde (1663-1743; twenty-four plates) and Giovanni Girolamo Frezza (1671-post 1748; two plates).

Bibliografia

Stefano Pierguidi, La Raccolta di statue antiche e moderne della calcografia De Rossi e un'impresa incompiuta di Charles Errard, in “Les cahiers d'histoire de l'art” 14, pp. 106-113.