Ludovisi Ares

The Ludovisi Ares is an Antonine Roman marble sculpture of Mars, a fine 2nd-century copy of a late 4th-century BCE Greek original, associated with Scopas or Lysippus: thus the Roman god of war receives his Greek name, Ares.

Ares/Mars is portrayed as young and beardless and seated on a trophy of arms, while an Eros plays about his feet, drawing attention to the fact that the god of war, in a moment of repose, is presented as a love object. The 18th-century connoisseur Johann Joachim Winckelmann, a man with a practiced eye for male beauty, found the Ludovisi Ares the most beautiful Mars that had been preserved from Antiquity, when he wrote the catalogue of the Ludovisi collection.

Rediscovered in 1622, the sculpture was apparently originally part of the temple of Mars (founded in 132 BCE in the southern part of the Campus Martius), of which few traces remain, for it was recovered near the site of the church of San Salvatore in Campo. Pietro Santi Bartoli recorded in his notes that it had been found near the Palazzo Santa Croce in Rione Campitelli during the digging of a drain. (Haskell and Penny 1981:260) The sculpture found its way into the collection formed by Cardinal Ludovico Ludovisi (1595–1632) the nephew of Pope Gregory XV at the splendid villa and gardens he built near Porta Pinciana, on the site where Julius Caesar and his heir, Octavian (Caesar Augustus), had had their villa. The sculpture was lightly restored by the young Bernini, who refinished its surfaces and discreetly provided a right foot; he was probably largely responsible for the cupid, which Haskell and Penny note was omitted from G.F. Susini's bronze replica and from the prints of the sculpture in Maffei's anthology.

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