Classic treasure

The Greek and Roman Collections
Sculpture Promenade 2010
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, until 28 January 2011

Virgil was wrong — don’t be afraid of Greeks bearing gifts, particularly if you’re a British regional museum. While our government has cut its grant to the Fitzwilliam by two per cent, Greek zillionaires have stepped admirably into the breach to subsidise the renovation of Cambridge’s heart-stopping Greek and Roman gallery, untouched since the Sixties. The Greek Ministry of Culture has chipped in, too; it may want the Elgin Marbles back but it’s happy to pay for Cambridge’s classical treasures to stay put, even while the Greek economy is on the skids.

Its prized euros have been well spent. The Fitzwilliam’s classical collection is the third best in the country, after the British Museum and the Ashmolean. Like the Ashmolean, the Fitzwilliam has benefited from several centuries’ worth of generous classics-obsessed professors and alumni.

Chief among those generous bequests is a vast, delicate marble bust of Antinous as Dionysus, vine leaves and grapes carved into his straggly hair. Antinous was the beautiful young Elvis lookalike the Emperor Hadrian fell so heavily for. When Antinous drowned in the Nile in 130AD, Hadrian was inconsolable, writing a death lament for his animula vagula blandula (‘roaming, caressing, little soul’). There were statues of Antinous all over the Empire, but this one came from Hadrian’s own private playground, his villa at Tivoli, just outside Rome, and was sculpted after the boy’s death. So this is the statue the emperor stared mournfully at every evening over the Falernian wine and the dormice dipped in honey.

Other matchless finds from Tivoli include a pair of Corinthian pilaster capitals, their acanthus leaves carved to razor sharpness, and the charming Lansdowne Relief — a black marble frieze with playful little Argonauts resisting the Sirens and dodging the man-eating Stymphalian birds with their bronze beaks and metal feathers.