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| Giovanni Battista de' Cavalieri Trajan's Forum Roman ruins enclosed by modern masonry structures 1569 engraving British Museum |
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| Antoine Lafréry Papal Blessing in St Peter's Square Michelangelo's new dome under construction 1580 engraving British Museum |
During the early 1500s relatively few Europeans possessed the resources or the desire to travel for pleasure, beyond the needs of practical business. Visitors to Rome were likely to be diplomats or scholars or Christian pilgrims. The missions that brought them to the city might or might not include a wish to inspect the surviving physical remnants of classical civilization. By the end of the the century, this balance of interests had changed. The taste for ancient sculpture and other artifacts had exploded among the swelling battalions of the educated, and Rome became uniquely identified with that heritage.
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| Jean de Gourmont Laocoön early 16th century, after 1506 engraving Rijksmuseum |
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| Marco Dente Laocoön early 16th century, after 1506 engraving Rijksmuseum |
The discovery of the Laocoön in 1506 aroused a new level of veneration for ancient sculpture in general, so impressed were its early viewers by the virtuoso carving of the marble and the radical expressiveness of the dying figures. Jean de Gourmont and Marco Dente both depicted this group in imagined classical settings, as if the statues of the Trojan priest and his sons were the bodies of the actual legendary characters acting out their story on location.
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| Antoine Lafréry Marforio 1550 engraving British Museum |
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| Anonymous printmaker Marforio and Pasquino 1547 etching Philadelphia Museum of Art |
Marforio and Pasquino were depicted together in 1547. Marforio was a colossal marble deity, probably an Oceanus, known in the Middle Ages and possibly having survived above ground since antiquity. The two figures as a pair were participants in the Italian tradition of talking statues. The white rectangles near Marforio's head (in the etching immediately above) represented written questions that citizens wished Marforio to "ask" of Pasquino. Written answers, in a biting sarcastic style, then appeared near the ancient, ruinous Pasquino statue (located on Piazza Navona, then as now). This practice of satirical and sarcastic commentary continued until late in the 19th century. Two additional Roman versions of the Pasquino group are on display in Florence, restored to a much higher level of finish. All three of these Pasquinos are believed to be Roman copies of the same lost Hellenistic original that showed Menelaos holding up the body of Patroclus after he had been fatally wounded by Hector in the Iliad.
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| Anonymous printmaker Pasquino 1542 engraving Metropolitan Museum of Art |
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| Nicolas Beatrizet Nile ca. 1545-70 engraving British Museum |
The colossal marble Nile (above) is believed to be a Roman copy of an even larger lost statue brought to Rome from Alexandria during Imperial times. In the 1520s the existing version of the Nile was set up in the Belvedere Court at the Vatican, facing a statue of the Tiber (below). Scholars now believe that the Tiber was an original creation of the Romans, purposely designed to form a pair after the arrival from Egypt of the original Nile. The two river gods were seized by the French under Napoleon in 1797 and carried to Paris as war booty. After Napoleon's fall in 1815 the statue of the Nile returned to the Vatican, but the Tiber was ceded to France by the Pope, along with one or two other gigantic works of looted art that nobody at the time wanted to bother transporting back to Italy. The Tiber remains to this day at the Louvre.
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| Nicolas Beatrizet Tiber ca. 1545-70 engraving Philadelphia Museum of Art |
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| Antonio Salamanca Alexander and Bucephalus on the Quirinal Hill ca. 1538-46 engraving British Museum |
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| Antoine Lafréry Alexander and Bucephalus on the Quirinal Hill 1550 engraving British Museum |
The Alexander and Bucephalus on the Quirinal Hill have been known by many different names (Horse Tamers ; Dioscuri ; Castor and Pollux ; Horses of Diomedes ; Horses of Achilles ; etc etc). The group was documented on the same spot in medieval pilgrim's guides to Rome. "It is almost certain that they had remained standing there since antiquity (for neither the machinery nor the motivation existed to move them, or to erect them, had they been excavated)," in the opinion of Haskell and Penny in Taste and the Antique. "Between 1589 and 1591, Pope Sixtus V had the Alexander and Bucephalus restored and set up on pedestals with a fountain between them." Like many other Roman remains, these were admired extravagantly and copied to infinity in the 18th and 19th centuries, but are now regarded by scholars as "clumsy monsters."
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| Antonio Tempesta Alexander and Bucephalus on the Quirinale Hill ca. 1589 etching British Museum |
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| Anonymous printmaker after Giovanni Guerra Alexander and Bucephalus on the Quirinale Hill after 1591 etching British Museum |
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| Antoine Lafréry Wolf – with Romulus and Remus 1552 engraving British Museum |
"This statue is first mentioned at the very end of the tenth century as being at the Lateran where executions were carried out – as they still were four centuries later. In the late twelfth or early thirteenth century the body of the Wolf stood in the portico at the entrance to the palace, represented as if stalking a bronze ram (which has long disappeared), from whose mouth came a stream of water for washing one's hands: the Wolf had apparently served the same purpose, the water coming from the teats, but by the time of this description it had been broken off at the feet, which (with the pedestal) probably remained in the open air in front of the palace. In 1471 the Wolf was given to the Conservators of Rome by Pope Sixtus IV, and by 1509 the figures of Romulus and Remus had been added. ... Until Winckelmann made the point almost in passing, no one seems to have been aware of the fact that the figures of Romulus and Remus were modern additions to an antique statue, and this ignorance helped to confuse an already very confusing situation." Haskell and Penny go on for pages describing the roller-coaster reputation of this Wolf. During the 19th century, German scholars claimed that it must have been made during the Middle Ages and not by the ancient Romans at all. The Germans placed a cast of the Wolf (without children) in the medieval Italian section of the Berlin Museum. This act was regarded by Italians as a grave national insult.