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Placement of Polyphemus group in the Sperlonga's grotto.

by Egenia Salza Prina Ricotti

The reconstructions

Having discovered where the Polyphemus group was set in the grotto, my reconstruction appeared in the papers of the Pontificia Accademia Romana di Archeologia completed by a sketch that showed how the statues were placed. The laying Polyphemus dominated the centre of the composition, Ulysses hanged over him ready to steady his head when his companion would put the flaming pole in his eye, and the scared companion, who was fleeing with his wine leather bottle, stood trembling in the right hand corner.
After my lecture Prof Colini had told me that nobody could move the Polyphemus from where I put him. Evidently he had a high consideration of all his colleagues. A few year elapsed before three people tried to do it. The first was Coarelli who put the Polyphemus, a statue which was close to 5 m long, in a niche set at the extreme end of the grotto which I had accurately surveyed and which measured 2.95 x 1,9 m, a hollow in which the giant could never have kept; but in the drawing included in Coarelli’s article that was just what he did. In it we could see the giant slanted in the niche that the draftsman had miraculously enlarged to an easy 3.30 x 2.50 and even more miraculously he had restricted Polyphemus to an easy 3.50 m. Apart from this the niche set in the extreme bottom of the grotto, quite far away from its mouth and scantily lighted, didn’t seem the right place to expose a works of art: in the dark nobody would have been able to see their beauty.

Then three years after my discovery a new book on Sperlonga appeared. It had been written by a Nuremberg professor, Hampe. It was a beauiful book all in coated paper in which 30 pages were all dedicated to me, and illustrated with my drawings for which the renowned professor had forgot to ask my consent, and yet I would certainly have given him the permission to use them. In the book Hampe stated that the giant and all the other statues had been rightly put by Andreae in the lateral grotto, while I, poor and unknown Italian lady, had everything wrong. After this extended attack Hampe reconstructed the grotto starting from its left side and charging the little fragile not founded wall with Ulysses ship (a sculpture probably weighing around 20 tons. It really seemed that at Nuremberg the laws of static were not taken in great account). After this he imagined that all along the rest of the little not founded wall there was an impressive water fall which, fueled by some fantastic spring or river fell on the floor of the grotto. Certainly if only it would have been possible to find the necessary water to make a waterfall, the effect would have been spectacular; unfortunately in the area there were not such springs or rivers and besides a waterfall would flood all the floor around the basin and made the grotto impracticable. Moreover the fragile not founded little wall would never had the force to sustain the water pressure and would have fallen to pieces at the first drop falling over it.
In the recension of this book that Prof. Andreae did, this famed archaeologist, a real gentleman, defended me and said that I and not Hampe was right.
Time passed and while professor Andreae was studying and publishing the sculptures, Conticello dedicated himself to the reconstruction of Polyphemus group and a life size gypsum copy of it was made. In this reconstruction Conticello - ignoring both the juncture point of Polyphemus’ foot, that I had found and pointed to him, and the mortar platform for the two Ulysses’ companions with the flaming pole - put the giant diagonally against the background in such a position that the most conspicuous part of the statue was the Cyclop’s big toe which was well in view and was certainly the first thing a bystander would notice, while the marble block under his foot – very functional, but certainly not aesthetic – was even more prominent. All this was done without keeping in account the fact that also a brief glimpse of the leg, kept in Sperlonga’s museum, and exposed parallel to a background wing, is enough to persuade anybody that it had been sculpted to be seen in this position and not pointing the sole of its foot to the museum’s visitors.
However what can’t be disputed is static, the monument’s static. No one can change it, not even Conticello. But he seems not to care about such trivial laws as the gravity and he begins by putting the companions of Ulysses, the ones with the flaming pole, which more or less weigh one ton each, artistically flying over the incoherent rocks at the foot of the backgound wall, a place where not a single concrete pedestal to sustain them exists, and that such a thing was necessary is proved by Ulysses’ scared companion’s statue, that, on the other side of the composition, rests on a very solid and large one.
Least but not last, to follow the scheme of the Catania’s Nachbildung, Conticello set Ulysses’ statue to the left of Polyphemus’. Here the statue would have hovered on the low background wall only 40 cm wide and not founded. It is not necessary to be an architect to understand that if this manufact had been charged with such a weight it would have immediately crumbled down. I don’t think it is necessary to waste more of our time on it. The only thing I should add is that it would already be better not to make a drawing of it and publish it in a book and that it is difficult to understand how it has been possible to let Conticello make a very expensive life size gypsum model of the group ( at least as he imagined it) and expose this mass in the Sperlonga’s Museum.
The years however passed and the reconstruction was even displayed in Rome and very strangely also then not one of the visitors realized that it was all wrong and that it could never stand. The only possible explanation was that they had never spent much time in the grotto and thus nobody noticed that the small wall was not founded and stood in the void, neither that Conticello had considered a very good stand for Ulysses’ statue, neither were they aware that in the area where he had placed his two companions with the flaming pole there was no block of mix to sustain them.
The years went by and it looked as I was the only one to know how much this reconstruction was wrong, but I stood calm knowing that on the rock under Polyphemus’ foot there was its juncture nd tha this would have set everything in place. I was however late to document those facts. I had marked the juncture on my plan and foolishly I had not done some photos. First of all at those time I had a very difficult relation with my camera and I used it in a horrible way. Moreover when I discovered the juncture on the rock I hadn’t it with me and soon afterward Conticello covered all the area with a kind of wooden stage. Nonetheless I had marked the little step on my plan and for me what attested the truth was my survey. Moreover when I had put the gypsum leg on the rock I had been struck by the exactness of this work and how the two parts coincided. It was not possible to insert a pin among the two surfaces and I wanted to understand how the sculptors had reached such a perfection.
Having found on the vault the hollows in which to mortise big and strong beams had shown to me that, before placing the statue the artists had kept Polyphemus, or at least his leg, suspended over it and evidently it was at this moment that they had sculpted the marble and had made it perfectly adherent to the rock and sustained by the little step. I wanted however to understand everything they had done.
In the meantime I had a lot of work to do, the research on Villa Adriana and the survey of a new plan of all the 186 hectares did not leave me time for other problems, but when at last I found the time to reflect on it I understood that to obtain such a perfection the sculptors did not only work on the marble but also on the rock, a rock that had already astonished me by it roundness that at the moment I considered due to a freak of nature. Then I understood that they had tried to keep in with both sides. Immediately after I called the Superintendence and told the Superintendent, my friend Dr. Veloccia that I had now cleared everything and that the morning after I would go there, photograph the juncture point and with this I would have close the argument.
Thus the day after with the company of a friend of mine, and of course with my camera, I arrived at Sperlonga and asked to go down to the grotto. The spectacle that confronted me there left me as a block of ice. The rocks on which the juncture point of Polyphemus’ foot rested, had been destroyed by a pickaxe and was now a shapeless mass. The stone set all naked a short time ago was still pink among the others still were covered by their dark coating of lichens. It was evident that in the night some mad criminal had stubbornly hit the poor innocent rock. Already some time before I had noticed the disappearance of the cement that fixed on the grotto’s soil the basis of Ulysses two companions and now this. Evidently I was really down on my luck. Thank to God, Conticello’s reconstruction was so impossible to accept, That at this moment it was the only help left to me.