Hypnos by a Roman sculptor, 120-130 AD. Recorded live March 30, 2022
Hello everyone and welcome to the prada museum in madrid spain we’re continuing our wednesday morning series of short conversations in english thanks to the help of the american friends of the prado museum we are a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting the museum and helping share this collection
In as many ways as we can including these conversations in english and today we are in one of the rooms with the collection of sculpture and we’ll be looking at just one of these pieces this sculpture this roman sculpture and marble of hypnos that is a replica of a greek bronze
And the replica was made between the years probably about 120 to 130 now hypnos was the god of sleep hip knows his name gives us the origin of the word hypnosis and hypnos lived with his brother his brother was thanatos the god of death in the underworld
His mother was nix the greek goddess of the night and according to mythology hypnos had 1 thousand children and one of his children might be familiar to us which is morpheus right morpheus was known for changing forms and so morpheus would go into dreams and be able to
Change into human form in people’s dreams so morpheus was also associated with sleep and hypnos also had a role in the trojan war uh hero asked hira asked hypnos to be to be put to put zeus to sleep so so he wouldn’t be able to help the trojans
And and so hypnos was important because after all sleep is is half of our lives and here we see him depicted leaning forward in motion looking downwards and whenever he looked into the eyes of his subjects he would put them to sleep he would make them fall asleep
And here he’s looking down at a figure that really isn’t present i mean there would be you know a subject here that he would be putting to sleep and um we have to imagine that subject we have to complete the story on our own and this is something that happens
Sometimes in hellenistic sculptures that a story a scene that would really probably require one or two different figures or more to really understand the narrative to understand what’s going on was depicted just with one kind of leaving the spectator to complete the scene on their own and so this is what
We have to do kind of complete the scene mentally with this hypothetical figure that would be here that he would be putting to sleep and we can also notice too that it kind of looks like um there’s two different angles there’s two different ways that
We can look at the sculpture if we look at it from the front we can appreciate his intense gaze and that he’s looking down and that he’s putting this subject to sleep and then if we come to the side we can see this long stride and this pronounced
Inclination so there really it looks like there’s two different ways that we can appreciate this sculpture and this is something else that really links the original sculpture perhaps to the second century bc because this was something that was common at that time to present a sculpture and kind of give
Two different ways maybe that you could look at that piece now as i mentioned before this is a roman replica this is a copy of a greek bronze but we have to remember that at that time they had a completely different idea of the value of originality um
There wouldn’t have been any qualms there wouldn’t have been any trouble with the value of a replica or a copy versus the original there’s no reason that a replica would have had any less importance any less significance than the original greek bronze now his arms have been lost we can see
Often we know you know extremities are some of the first things of classical sculptures that break off because they stick out and then they’re most fragile and then they’re lost but we know that his right arm extended forward and it would have held a horn that would hold an elixir
Made of herbs and water from the river leafy now the river leafy was one of the five rivers of the underworld and it was associated with forgetfulness and and so this elixir would uh put anyone to sleep if it just touched their lips and in his left arm in his hand he would
Have held a bunch of poppies and poppies are of course also associated with drowsiness he also would have had wings in the original sculpture and this trunk here really is for stability we have to remember that marble is a really really heavy material and so this kind of leaning um this
Inclination here would have required a really strong base often when you see in sculptures at the decorative base that there’s a base that seems decorative or has an attribute sometimes it really is also there to add stability to add strength now much of the collection of classical
Sculpture is here today thanks to the queen isabel de farnesio is the second wife of king philip v of spain and she helped negotiate the purchase of the sculpture collection of queen christina of sweden in 1724 but this actually wasn’t purchased by isabel this was this didn’t come into
The collection at this time the sculpture actually entered the collection earlier and it might have even been one of the first pieces to do so in 1557 the first two statues of the cult of the collection were donated to the spanish royal family and one of them
Was a statue of mercury and the description might match this one of hypnos in motion now i said that this is hypnosis it’s not mercury but the thing is is that this was actually identified as mercury up until the 19th century now we have to remember that identifying determining the identity of
These pieces can often be really difficult and it’s part of the work of art historians because these things are found in archaeological science and they’re often fragmented and then often throughout history they’re reconstructed in different ways sometimes aggressively and and not always correctly and so all of
These things add up to the complication of identifying the person that’s represented so until the 19th century this was identified as mercury and it’s interesting to know that when it was found in the renaissance that the scholars of the time weren’t able to to pin this down is hypnos they didn’t
Recognize it as hypnos and they mistook it for mercury because he was commonly represented at the time but um The confusion probably really originates with these wings this is something that’s characteristic of mercury right these these wings but here with hypnos we see them growing out of his temples there are a few differences in the way that the little wings are represented on hypnos and on mercury in hypnos here
They come growing out of his temples now these wings would cover the eyes of his subjects and uh put them to sleep and and provoke memory loss and if we remember mercury if we can think of an image of mercury he has this the pedestal he has this wide brimmed hat
And the wings grow out of his head so there’s a little bit of a difference in how it’s represented here and another thing that helps us to identify this as hypnos is also the inclination itself the fact that this is a sculpture that’s in motion um
This wouldn’t have been a typical way to represent mercury in antiquity we can think of lots of representations of mercury in motion now dynamic moving mercury’s but really in antiquity he was presented in a way that’s very static this wouldn’t have been a typical way to to represent mercury
But this gesture this pose does fit with hypnos who would be flying over humanity and putting them to sleep and there’s also a few attributes that we would be missing with mercury normally we’d see mercury again with the with the pedesis with the hat with the
Wings that are growing out of it also he might wear his cape or his sandals now it’s possible that this was part of the decoration of the roman emperor hadrian’s villa in tivoli and this sculpture of hypnos would make sense in the iconographic plan of a roman villa because of its association
With ideas of rest of sleep of forgetfulness and in the idea of leisure of odium of leisure in a roman villa and with this we’ll conclude our short conversation in english for today and i hope that you’ve enjoyed having a closer look at hypnos and at the collection of sculpture
You can find out more about this collection on the prada’s website you can also find out more about the american friends of the prada museum and the work that we do on our website in our sister organization the foundation amigos so thank you for joining and we’ll see you again next wednesday
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