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Giuseppe Franchi (1731–1806) with a Bust of Homer
Anton Raphael Mengs·1772
Historical Context
Giuseppe Franchi (1731–1806) was an Italian sculptor who spent many years in Spain, working for the Spanish court and becoming a significant figure in late eighteenth-century Iberian sculpture. Mengs's 1772 portrait depicting him with a bust of Homer — now in the Ashmolean — belongs to a tradition of artist portraits in which the sitter is shown with an attribute of their art: a bust for a sculptor, a canvas for a painter. The Homer bust is itself significant: Homer was the supreme classical poet and an emblem of antique cultural prestige, and a sculptor shown in relation to Homer's image presents himself as a practitioner of an art continuous with antiquity. The Ashmolean's holding of this portrait places it within one of Britain's great university collections alongside the Thomas Conolly portrait, suggesting the Oxford collection received multiple Mengs works through related collecting channels.
Technical Analysis
The compositional challenge of a portrait with a substantial sculptural prop required Mengs to integrate the three-dimensional bust into a two-dimensional field in a way that enhanced rather than disrupted the portrait. The contrasting textures of painted marble or plaster and living flesh would have been treated with careful technical differentiation.
Look Closer
- ◆The contrast between Franchi's living flesh and the white marble or plaster of the Homer bust is a standard element of such compositions, underlining the sculptor's mastery of the transition between life and stone.
- ◆Franchi's attitude toward the bust — studying it, gesturing toward it, or merely resting his hand upon it — encodes a specific relationship between the living sculptor and his antique model.
- ◆The Homer bust's stylistic character, if specific enough, would indicate which of the well-known antique Homer types Mengs chose to represent — the Blind Homer or the Elgin-type.
- ◆Mengs's treatment of Franchi's face provides evidence of how he approached the portrait of a professional sculptor — a sitter whose own practice involved the close observation of human form.
