Ippolito Buzzi - Classical Restorations

Classical Restorations

From about 1620 Buzzi was virtually the house restorer for Cardinal Ludovisi, who possessed in his villa on the Quirinale one of the finest collections of Roman sculptures in Rome, and commissioned repairs from Gian Lorenzo Bernini—whose minor restorations to the Ludovisi Ares are discreet—and Alessandro Algardi, who supported himself with restoration work, as well as Buzzi. Some of Buzzi's restorations are minor interventions to satisfy the taste of the day, as with the Ludovisi Dying Gaul; while others are more creative and incur the uneasy dissatisfaction of 21st-century writers on antiquities, especially when unrelated fragments were assembled, to create essentially new compositions, such as Buzzi's Amore and Psyche in the Ludovisi collection. A Hermaphroditus belonging to Ludovisi was restored by Buzzi, 1621–23; it was later purchased by Ferdinando II de' Medici and is in the Uffizi. Buzzi restored the marble group in the Prado now identified equally as Castor and Pollux or as Orestes and Pylades providing the headless torso with an ancient bust of Antinous, the emperor Hadrian's favorite.

Examples of a kind of hybrid sculpture that typifies some aspects of Roman taste of the time are two portrait heads that are fitted to antique Roman busts; they stand side by side in the Palazzo dei Conservatori, Sala dei Capitani: one is a head of Alessandro Farnese by Buzzi, 1593, the other a head of Carlo Barberini by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, 1630.