Art To Own 2: Flora and Priapus

      For many years – infact since I first laid eyes on them – I have loved the marble figures of “SpringIn The Guise of Flora” and “Autumn In The Guise of Priapus” at the MetropolitanMuseum of Art in Manhattan.  

   They are the work of Pietro Bernini (1562-1629), assisted by hismore famous son, Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680), who was trained as asculptor in his workshop.  

       Flora and Priapus werecarved in 1616-17 and created for Cardinal Scipione Borghese as a commission for his BorgheseGardens in Rome.  The statues remainedthere until 1898 when they were purchased by Luther Kountze, who exported themto the gardens of his house in Morristown, New Jersey.  Kountze’s descendants later sold the propertyto the Roman Catholic Order of Saint Benedict, who established the DelbartonSchool (a boy’s secondary school) there in 1939.  The Met acquired the statues from Delbarton in1990.

 

   Flora is the Roman godess of flowers and, like Priapus, the sonof Aphrodite who appears in both Greek and Roman mythology, a fertilityfigure.

   “Each consisting of ahalf-body merging into a tapering pedestal, they originally stood in thegardens of the Villa Borghese in Rome, at the entrance to the cardinal's Vignadi Porta Pinciana.  Appropriately ladenwith fruits and flowers, the Flora and Priapus, carved in an energetic, rusticfashion, symbolize the abundance of nature in spring and autumn.” (Source:  Metropolitan Museum catalogue.)

   Flora and Priapus arebreathtakingly fresh and beautiful and have the unexpected quality of beingvivid, fully-realized sketches in hard stone.  

Borghese Gardens, Rome

   Iwould like to place them in my garden flanking mysmall triumphal arch.


 

     

Kountze mansion, Delbarton School, Morristown, New Jersey 

Please see also:  Art To Own 1 (Triumphal Arch)