Persephone, the so-called Abbondanza Grimani
The so-called Abbondanza Grimani is part of an interesting group of Greek statues depicting, probably, the goddess Demeter and her daughter Persephone and belonged in the Renaissance period to Giovanni Grimani’s and Federico Contarini’s collections. These collections formed the “Public Statuary of the Serenissima”, set in the Vestibule of the Marciana Library and inaugurated in 1596. The Public Statuary was one of the first public museums in Italy and in Europe and it constituted the nucleus of the current National Archaeological Museum of Venice.
Dated from 430 to 375 B.C., these statues come from sanctuaries dedicated to the two divinities and likely situated in Asia Minor or on the Aegean Islands. Studied for the first time by the German archaeologist Adolf Furtwängler in 1898, this remarkable group of Greek originals of the Classical period has always awaken the researchers’ interest. Indeed, unlike other important Renaissance collections gathered by the European courts and consisting mainly of Roman antiquities, the Public Statuary exhibited antiquities directly from continental Greece, from the Aegean Islands and from Asia Minor. These areas were on the Venetian trade routes for centuries or included in the Republic of Venice. Therefore, the Venetian antiquarian market was thriving and so well provided with Greek antiquities that lots of Italian and even European princes went to Venice to purchase artworks.
The female statue wears a pleated dress and a wrap-around mantle falling from its left shoulder down to its hips. The style of the drapery, elegant and lightweight, suggested that the anonymous sculptor should have drawn inspiration from Phidias, who was famous for his sculptures in the Parthenon, and so the archaeologists dated the statue back to 430-420 B.C. Some details are remarkable, for example the small holes visible amongst the locks of hair and on the earlobes, due to a crown and metal earrings, which are nowadays lost. To see, moreover, the fracture on its neck (however, the head is original), and the absence of its forearms. In particular, the forearms, removed in the 1920s, were the outcome of a Renaissance restoration, thanks to which the restorers added a cornucopia with flowers and fruit to the arms of the statue.
Hence, the restoration, due to a misunderstanding about the role of the depicted subject, turned the Greek Persephone into the Roman personification of Abundance, giving rise to the name with which this statue is commonly called, even nowadays.
