Capitoline Museums
The equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius
The equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius (175AD) gets center stage of Michelangelo’s design of the Piazza del Campidoglio along with his mesmerizing geometric paving design.
The only reason we have this statue today is kind of an amusing story. Nobody knows exactly where it first stood because after the Fall of Rome about 900 years passed where these things were not really accounted for. When the Renaissance was really in full swing an interest in classicism was at its heart. However Pope Paul III wasn’t interested in “pagan rulers” he only liked the Christian Emperor Constantine, so when they found this statue somehow the pope assumed it to be Constantine and instructed Michelangelo to use it as his centerpiece. I guess no one pointed out the fact that Constantine was beardless in all known depictions. Some 70 bronze statues were melted down for other uses.
So it was just a case of mistaken identity. And it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. Marcus Aurelius is my favorite emperor because he was poetic and wise. If you ever have a chance to read his writings called “Meditations” they are short snippets really usually about self-improvement and strengthening of the mind.
There were at least 88 Roman Emperors and only 5 were considered good, the rest were not even close. I was recently at the underground museum of the Stadio di Domiziano in which they stated there were 6 good emperors but strangely only had biographies on 5. The rest behaved like out-of-control Millennials.
Pope Paul III was not all that bad either. He decreed in 1547 that the indigenous people of the Americas were “human beings and not to be robbed of their freedom or possessions”, however for some reason he was fine with slavery so long as they were captured Muslims.
In 1981 the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius was carefully taken down to perform renovations and a replica was erected in its place. These pictures are of the replica. I failed to photograph Michelangelo’s pavement in order to get that eerie faint sun in the sky.
Portrait of a Flavian Woman
They’ve moved her, her real place of display is by a pretty little window on the second floor of the Capitoline Museum but during my most recent visit she has temporarily been moved to a new exhibit centered on Domitian’s fractured reign which runs through January of 2023 after which she will be returned to her window. I like the display by the window more than the temporary display with its distracting bright blue background and silly mirror in the back. So the first picture is not mine, I pulled it off the internet but the blue background ones are mine.
Basically we don’t know who she was (we don’t even know who the sculptor was!). Whoever she was she would have been alive for the abusive rule of Nero and also when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79CE, she would have seen the draining of Nero’s grand lake where construction began on the Flavian Amphitheatre which we know as the Colosseum (72CE). There was a plague and two fires likely she would have been witness to as well. As dolled up and delicate and pretty as she is here it’s hard to imagine some of the horrors of her day. Flavian Woman simply means a woman from that brief period and her hairstyle was commonplace then, there are lots of other sculptures displaying this but none as exquisite as hers. The fact that she is marble is really hard to believe, especially up close, each curl and ringlet had to be hand drilled and shaped with a chisel, and the wisps of hair on her neck are especially delicate. It’s astonishing that this was made in this era.
I definitely had a Somewhere In Time moment while I sat studying her.
The Flavian Dynasty lasted only 27 years as there were three Flavian emperors, one father and his two sons (Vespasian, CE 69–79; Titus, CE 79–81; Domitian, CE 81–96). Vespasian’s rise to power came after Nero’s suicide and the dynasty ended with the assassination of his youngest son Domitian
Vespasian
One of the more interesting Emperors of Rome, Vespasian was a real rags to riches story. He started life as a mule breeder. He is not considered one of the Five Good Emperors somehow, though I kind of like him. He came directly after the crazy Nero and returned stability to the empire, he also gave us the Coloseum. In the middle ages his colossal head was lobotomized and turned into a basin, nobody knows why.
