Vincenzo Giustiniani was one of the most famous and innovative aristocratic collectors of the 17th century. His collection included art of his own day and more than 1,500 pieces of ancient statuary. He delighted in dramatic displays of his collection that brought antiquity to life. As part of this effort, Giustiniani supervised an army of technicians who made extensive repairs to works by adding elements to ancient fragments to create complete statues. VMFA’s Septimius Severus is one such example.
This method of creatively completing ancient statues is very different from today’s efforts toward conservation and restoration, which seek to preserve the integrity of fragments. Giustiniani was nevertheless an important figure in the development of art history. His famous and much visited gallery was a precursor to the modern museum, and he produced one of the first illustrated catalogues of ancient sculpture—The Galleria Giustiniani—in which VMFA’s statue of Septimius Severus appears. Giustiniani also wrote a treatise on connoisseurship and the conservation of ancient sculpture.
In the early 1900s Mrs. Frederick F. Thompson, a wealthy and well-connected New York collector, brought a number of sculptures from the Giustiniani collection to the United States. Many of the statues had sustained damage during the voyage and were sent to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to be repaired and conserved. Eleven of the works remained at the Met and others were sent to institutions throughout the country. The Septimius Severus statue was part of the art collection at Williams College in Massachusetts until VMFA acquired it in 1967.