Model for “Escaping from Pompeii”

Notes: this is the terracotta model for the marble sculpture In fuga da Pompei, made by Benzoni on commission of the American collector Marietta Stevens.

In Escape from Pompeii, a late work by Giovanni Maria Benzoni, executed in 1868, is also known under the title The Pompe ians or The Last Days of Pompeii. The original sculptural group – of which he later executed at least three replicas – was made for Mrs. Marietta Reed Stevens, a collector and philanthropist, wife of Paran Stevens, one of the most prominent property and hotel owners in New York in the second half of the 19th century. Their prestigious collection of European art was housed in one of Manhattan’s most elegant mansions, the so-called Marble Row (later torn down), between 5th Avenue and 57th Street, inhabited by Mrs Marietta Stevens from 1891. In Escape from Pompeii stood out among other sculptures in the vast gallery on the second floor and had been commissioned from Giovanni Maria Benzoni who, by then famous throughout Europe, had also made his fame spread overseas.

Having visited Naples and Pompeii in the 1950s and 1960s, the sculptor was not only impressed by the archaeological excavations, but also by the devastating power of Vesuvius. In the sculpture, in fact, he depicts a family fleeing from its painful fate, with the male figure trying to protect his wife and child by vigorously pulling a cloak over himself, while the woman instinctively covers the infant in her arms with her hand, to shelter him from the lapilli. The terracotta sketch heralds the dynamism of the finished sculpture and, above all, the direction of mild and delicate verism that Benzoni took towards the latter part of his career. Compared to the finished group, in the model it is necessary to highlight certain particularities that make it truly unique: not only the couple’s desperate and frightened gestures and faces (which are partly softened in the marble sculpture, dissolving into a sort of restrained pathos ), but also the wavy drapery and, above all, the lapilli that are deposited on the ground and on the figures, some executed in relief, others painted in a darker shade of terracotta, a truly unusual technique that gives a decidedly fresh and realistic effect to the sketch. Another sign of this tendency towards the search for the real, are the objects that can be glimpsed at the feet of the two figures and that in the finished sculpture remain further back and less visible: an amphora, a torch and two loaves of spelt bread, artefacts certainly studied by the sculptor at the National Archaeological Museum in Naples, when it was still known as the Real Museo Borbonico. Moreover, the dynamism of the composition, the flight from the flames, and the choice of the three fleeing figures find their model in the ancient iconography of Aeneas carrying his father Anchises on his shoulders and his son Ascanius away from the flames of the Trojan fire. Certainly Benzoni had seen Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s group in the Borghese collection, but also the depiction of the same scene in Raphael’sIncendio di borgo in the Vatican Stanze, from which the sculptor from Bergamo seems to have quoted the same position of the spread legs and the drapery covering the man’s belly, in the excitement of the flight.