The Giustiniani Hestia is a finely-executed marble sculpture, a perhaps Hadrian

Hadrian

Hadrian , was Roman Emperor from 117 to 138. He is best known for building Hadrian's Wall, which marked the northern limit of Roman Britain. In Rome, he re-built the Pantheon and constructed the Temple of Venus and Roma. In addition to being emperor, Hadrian was a humanist and was philhellene in...

ic Roman copy of a Greek bronze of about 470 BCE, now in the Torlonia Collection (see Torlonia Museum

Torlonia Museum

The Torlonia Museum |Villa Torlonia]] on the Via Nomentana) was a museum in Rome, which housed the Torlonia Collection of ancient sculptures....

), Rome, but named for its early owner, marchese Vincenzo Giustiniani

Vincenzo Giustiniani

thumb|upright|Vincenzo Giustiniani in a portrait by [[Nicolas Régnier]] Marchese Vincenzo Giustiniani was an aristocratic Italian banker, art collector and intellectual of the late 16th and early 17th centuries, known today largely for the Giustiniani art collection, assembled at Palazzo...

. It is the only known Early Classical bronze that was reproduced at full size in marble for a Roman collection: Roman taste ran more towards the Hellenistic baroque.

Winckelmann

Johann Joachim Winckelmann

Johann Joachim Winckelmann was a German art historian and archaeologist. He was a pioneering Hellenist who first articulated the difference between Greek, Greco-Roman and Roman art...

 cited the Hestia Giustiniani as an example of the austere early stage of Classical Greek sculpture

Ancient Greek sculpture

Ancient Greek sculpture is the sculpture of Ancient Greece. Modern scholarship identifies three major stages. They were used to depict the battles, mythology, and rulers of the land known as Ancient Greece.-Geometric:...

. For female figures, early fifth-century sculptors mostly gave up the crinkly sleeved chiton

Chiton (costume)

A chiton was a form of clothing worn by men and women in Ancient Greece, from the Archaic period to the Hellenistic period ....

, which had been popular in the later sixth century BCE, and returned to the sleeveless peplos

Peplos

A peplos is a body-lengthGreek garment worn by women before 500 BC. The peplos is a tubular cloth folded inside-out from the top about halfway down, altering what was the top of the tube to the waist and the bottom of the tube to ankle-length. The garment is then gathered about the waist and the...

with heavy, dominantly vertical folds not unlike the fluting of a column. With the body so shrouded the relaxation of pose has been limited to turning the head. Several Attic or Argive sculptors have been speculatively suggested as the author of the lost original.

The sculpture was known in the Giustiniani

Giustiniani

Giustiniani is the name of a prominent Italian family which originally belonged to Venice, but also established itself subsequently in Genoa, and at various times had representatives in Naples, Corsica and in the islands of the Archipelago, where they had been the last Genoese rulers of the Aegean...

 collection in Palazzo Giustiniani, Rome, from the early 1630s, the date of a drawing made for the antiquarian Cassiano dal Pozzo

Cassiano dal Pozzo

Cassiano dal Pozzo was an Italian scholar and patron of arts. The secretary of Cardinal Francesco Barberini, he was an antiquary in the classicizing circle of Rome, and a long-term friend and patron of Nicolas Poussin, whom he supported from his earliest arrival in Rome: Poussin in a letter...

 and was illustrated in the engraved catalogue of the Galleria Giustiniani, produced under the direction of Joachim von Sandrart

Joachim von Sandrart

Joachim von Sandrart was a German Baroque art-historian and painter, active in Amsterdam during the Dutch Golden Age.-Biography:Sandrart was born in Frankfurt, but the family originated from Mons...

 in two deluxe volumes, 1635-36 and 1638 In its first appearance in a Giustiniani inventory, 1638, it was a "vergine vestale vestita, di marmo greco tutta antica alta palmi 9" (quoted by Lachenal), "a clothed Vestal Virgin

Vestal Virgin

In ancient Roman religion, the Vestals or Vestal Virgins , were priestesses of Vesta, goddess of the hearth. The College of the Vestals and its well-being was regarded as fundamental to the continuance and security of Rome, as embodied by their cultivation of the sacred fire that could not be...

, of Greek marble wholly antique, height 9 palmi." The sculpture appeared in François Perrier

François Perrier (painter)

François Perrier , a French painter and etcher, is remembered for his two collections of prints after antique sculptures, the Segmenta nobilium signorum et statuarum quae temporis dentem invidium evasere, , and Icones et segmenta...quae Romae adhuc extant ; they provided visual repertories of...

, Segmenta nobilium signorum (Paris and Rome, 1638), plate lxxii. The Hestia was purchased from the Giustiniani heirs in the nineteenth century and re-erected in Palazzo Lungara, where it was described by Ennio Quirino Visconti

Ennio Quirino Visconti

Ennio Quirino Visconti was an Italian antiquarian and art historian, papal Prefect of Antiquities, and the leading expert of his day in the field of ancient Roman sculpture....

. It was removed to the Torlonia Villa Albani after World War II and was reinstalled in the 1990s in the courtyard of the Palazzo Torlonia in via della Conciliazione

Via della Conciliazione

Via della Conciliazione is a street in the Rione of Borgo within Rome, Italy. Roughly 500 m in length, it connects Saint Peter's Square to the Castel Sant'Angelo on the western bank of the Tiber River. The road was constructed between 1936 and 1950, and it is the primary access route to the...

.

Contemporary scholarship is less secure about the sculpture's identification as Hestia, in part because of literary references to her imageless sanctuaries, though a similar figure is painted on a cup at Berlin attributed to the Sosias Painter (Lachenal): Demeter

Demeter

In Greek mythology, Demeter is the goddess of the harvest, who presided over grains, the fertility of the earth, and the seasons . Her common surnames are Sito as the giver of food or corn/grain and Thesmophoros as a mark of the civilized existence of agricultural society...

 and Hera

Hera

Hera was the wife and one of three sisters of Zeus in the Olympian pantheon of Greek mythology and religion. Her chief function was as the goddess of women and marriage. Her counterpart in the religion of ancient Rome was Juno. The cow and the peacock were sacred to her...

are alternative candidates. Often such attribution issues are skirted in modern scholarship by designating such sculptures simply as peplophoroi ("peplum-wearers")