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Lot Essay
In 1598, Fulvio Orsini, the librarian and antiquarian of the Farnese family identified a bust in the family's collection as Seneca, the Roman philosopher was the founder of the school of Stoicism and tutor to the Emperor Nero. The spurious attribution was based upon the fact that the gaunt, emaciated features of the bust projected a vitality rooted in internal strength that was befitting of Stoic philosophy, particularly of a man who might have been contemplating a forced suicide. Peter Paul Rubens saw the Farnese bust and was very taken by it, so much so that it influenced his depiction of the philosopher in his 1611 painting, The Death of Seneca. In 1754, a bronze version of the same portrait was found at the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum, now in the Archaeological Museum in Naples and dating to the 1st century B.C., which predated the life of the philosopher. The archaeologist and art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann began questioning the attribution after this discovery, and his doubts were confirmed in 1813 when a double portrait of Socrates and Seneca was found at the Villa Mattei on the Caelian Hill in Rome, now in the Altes Museum in Berlin, that had an inscription identifying Seneca. This depiction looks nothing like that of the Farnese bust of "Seneca". The "Pseudo-Seneca" is now thought to depict an imagined portrait of the Greek comedic playwright Aristophanes or the poet Hesiod, hence the adding of "pseudo" to the nomenclature.
Hesiod is a particularly apt identification. P. Zanker notes: "[...] this portrait seems to aim at capturing a specific set of biographical data, at rendering in its particular pathos a specific and unmistakable spiritual physiognomy comprising these elements: manual labor, poverty, a disregard for personal appearance, and a breathless, almost fanatical power of speech. All this seems to point to the peasant-poet Hesiod, who was called to poetry by the Muses while he was tending his goats on Mount Helikon and who lived and, in his verses, described a life of inexorable toil, worry, and disappointment" (The Mask of Socrates: The Image of the Intellectual, p. 151).
Hesiod is a particularly apt identification. P. Zanker notes: "[...] this portrait seems to aim at capturing a specific set of biographical data, at rendering in its particular pathos a specific and unmistakable spiritual physiognomy comprising these elements: manual labor, poverty, a disregard for personal appearance, and a breathless, almost fanatical power of speech. All this seems to point to the peasant-poet Hesiod, who was called to poetry by the Muses while he was tending his goats on Mount Helikon and who lived and, in his verses, described a life of inexorable toil, worry, and disappointment" (The Mask of Socrates: The Image of the Intellectual, p. 151).