Gardens of Nudes - Part Two
Huge numbers of statues were removed from Hadrian's Villa during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, but a few statues remain along the edges of the Canopus. Hadrian's Canopus is a formal canal which was named after a suburb of Alexandria where an arm of the Nile led to a temple of Serapis. Hadrian lined his Canopus with copies of Greek "old masters"; this is also the area where many of the sculptures in the Vatican's Museo Gregoriano Egiziano were found.
It is characteristic of Roman attitudes towards art that the architecture of Hadrian's Villa is very innovative, but most of the villa's statues were just high quality reproductions. Part of the reason for this is that many architects were Roman; it is quite likely that Hadrian may have been the principle designer for his villa. The Romans saw architecture as part of the "manly" art of engineering, while painting and sculpture were connected with their ambivalent feelings towards the Greeks. The Romans were in awe of Greek culture, but they always saw Greek culture as a corrupting influence. They preferred to leave painting and sculpture to the effete Greeks and they looked down on any Romans who practiced those arts. Virgil expressed this attitude in his Aeneid, Book VI,, where Anchises prophesies to Aeneas: "There will be others, at least so I believe, far abler than you to breathe life into bronze and carve living faces from marble.....but remember, Roman, your art will lie in governing nations, in keeping true peace, in sparing the humbled and crushing the proud."
For two hundred years before Hadrian built his villa, Romans had been importing vast quantities of statues from Greece and the other Hellenistic kingdoms which they absorbed either through conquest or inheritance. If they couldn't steal or buy a famous statue, they would commission an artist to make a copy of it.
We tend to think of Imperial Rome as a very crowded city, and the areas where most people lived were quite congested, but an eighth of the city was given over to large gardens. The first of these gardens was the Horti Luclliani, which was created by Lucius Licinius Lucullus (born circa 104 - died 57 BCE). His garden, which became the favorite playground of the Empress Messalina (after she had the current owner, Valerius Asiaticus, executed) , was filled with antique statues and copies
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