Male bust, the so-called Vitellio Grimani
The National Archaeological Museum of Venice displays a wide collection of Roman portraits. The most famous is possibly the so-called Vitellio Grimani. It dates back to the 2nd century A.D. and it has been successful since the Renaissance. At the beginning of the 16th century it belonged to cardinal Domenico Grimani. He was a fine humanist and an art lover. This Venetian nobleman gathered an important collection of sculptures during his long stays in Rome and some of these statues were discovered exactly in his Roman estate, on the Quirinal Hill.
The gallery of portraits was an essential part of a collection of antiquities during the Renaissance. Indeed, the scholars, who studied the ancient authors, used to collect coins and statues representing the protagonists of their reading. Suetonius (1st-2nd century A.D.) wrote in The twelve Caesars that Vitellius, emperor from April to December in 69 A.D., was a fat and dissolute person. This description by Suetonius and the resemblance between this bust and the profiles on the coins depicting Vitellius probably caused a wrong identification.
In fact, this male bust represents an unidentified man whose features are very realistic: thick eyebrows, a prominent nose, thin lips, fat chin and cheeks. Some technical features, for example the shape of the bust, the hairstyle and the engraved pupils, have led the researchers to date the statue back to the Hadrian period (120-140 A.D.).
This portrait was bequeathed to the Republic of Venice in 1523 and exhibited with other statues in the Doge’s Palace, in a room called “Stanza delle Teste” (“Hall of the Heads”) ever since. This important location allowed lots of artists to study the Vitellio Grimani and to be inspired by it. There are drawings and sketches, for example those by Tintoretto and Jacopo Palma The Younger, confirming that this statue was object of deep study; and there are famous paintings depicting its features, attributed to different characters each time. To see Feast in the house of Levi, painted by Paolo Veronese in 1573 for the dining-hall of the monastery of San Giovanni e Paolo and nowadays in the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice. To conclude, it is known that there are several reproductions of the Vitellio Grimani made in different historical periods and of various materials, as the bronze replica belonged to the Venetian nobleman Giacomo Contarini and here on show too.
