LA
FANCIULLA D’ANZIO (THE MAIDEN FROM ANZIO)
It
is believed to be one of the most singular statues of ancient times. It
was found in 1878 inside a niche of the Imperial Villa and it is formed by
two blocks of marble of which the finer is the one used for the head, the
naked part of the right shoulder, the chest and the right arm.
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The
statue is 170 centimetres high and portrays a young girl turning
her towards left while she is moving forward, wearing a chiton and
a large himation. The hurried hairstyle allows us to glimpse some
capricious curls; the fair sinuous line which comes down from the
nape to the naked shoulder and, lower, to the bent leg with a
lightly raised foot, shows a particular liberty of movement and a
variable rhythm, putting her in an intermediate phase between
walking solemnly and stopping. This
attitude and most of all the votive objects (a wool bandage, a
twig of laurel, a lion’s paw, all placed on a tray toward which
she is gazing at), have made the scholars think that she might be
a priestess or, in any case, a personage connected to the cult of
some divinity.
The closer and more appropriate comparison with the fresh and
youthful features of her face is with the one of the squatted
Aphrodite of Doidalsas, whose smoothness and softness pervade her
characteristics while her lips are half-opening into a barely
showed smile that reveals her pervaded mood by calm and serenity.
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The artistic
profile
The refinement of
the execution and the freedom of movement have made somebody believe
that the statue might be an original Greek one, dated to the second
half of the third century BC, judging it a work of Praxiteles’s sons
who have received the new achievements of Lysippus while they were
working in their father school.
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Some
other scholars believe instead that the statue might be a copy, even
though gorgeous, created during a period between Tiberius and Nero.
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During the last five centuries,
many masterpieces of the ancient statuary have been found in Anzio
like, for example, the Apollo of Anzio and the Hermes Ludovisi
both in the National Roman Museum; the Apollo of Belvedere, in the
Vatican Museums; the Borghese Gladiator, in the Louvre Museum; the
Aesculapius, in the Capitolini Museums; the Jupiter, in the Albani
Collection, etc,. But the “Fanciulla d’Anzio (with this name
it has made modern history) because of its excellent execution,
has been adopted quiet rightly as symbol of the ancient greatness
of the Roman Antium and of the rebirth of the modern Anzio. At the
moment, the statue is kept into the National Roman Museum in Rome.
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ATTENZIONE
!!!
La riproduzione o distribuzione, totale
o parziale, non
autorizzata del testo riportato in lingua inglese è vietata e punibile
per legge.
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