Resumen de Raphael's 'Philemon' and the collecting of antiquities in Rome
Part of a special section on Raphael on the occasion of “Raphael: From Urbino to Rome,” an exhibition at the National Gallery, London, through January 16, 2005. The writer discusses the significance of Raphael's possession of a Greek sculpture of the poet and playwright Philemon. In the early 16th century, the elite members of the Roman curia transformed the collecting and display of ancient sculpture into their own distinct cultural practice. Raphael himself also collected, as is known from Pierio Valeriano's description of Raphael's ancient marble statue, whose subject was identified in a Greek inscription as the playwright Philemon. Raphael's display of this piece implicitly placed the artist in the ranks of the papacy and with those who imitated the papal collections in their urban palaces. Evoking an ideal entirely different from the virtus of the Roman portrait busts so popular in the 17th century and instead embracing the newer intellectual ideal of the Greek Academy, the piece shows that the artist wished posterity to remember him, too, as an intellectual.
