Clever old Miuccia Prada to launch her foundation in Milan with an exhibition of ancient Roman sculpture by a five-star academic, Salvatore Settis, and to follow through in her Venetian palazzo, Ca’ Corner della Regina.
No whiff here of the commercialism that outgoing director of Tate Modern, Chris Dercon, says has so pervaded contemporary art that he fears for its future. Instead, we have an examination of how the great prototype sculptures, mostly Greek and mostly lost, were copied over and over in ancient times, and then again from the Renaissance until the very beginning of modernity.
They have been displayed by Prada’s architect and guru, Rem Koolhaas, and if you think you don’t care for this sort of thing, view it as an installation. If, on the other hand, you are the kind of art historian who knows about the subject, go and see it for the pleasure that the juxtapositions and the underlying idea may give you.
On the piano nobile, they have lined up, in decreasing size, one of the most famous sculptures of all time, the Farnese Hercules, from the two-metre original to a coloured version in Doccia porcelain that will fit in your hand.
Don’t fall into the anachronism of thinking this has anything to do with appropriation. These copies were all about paying tribute to immortal masters and to an ideal of beauty, respectful homage to an age thought to be better than the present, ornaments for minds drilled in the classics (from which we get the adjective whose meaning we have largely forgotten). By owning the humblest reproduction of one of these figures, you felt you had a slice of the glorious past.