remembering the end of eternity SM
18 th & 19 th century
architectural mementos of ancient, ruined rome
Contents
Remembering the End of Eternity: 18th & 19th Century Architectural Mementos of Ancient, Ruined Rome
I. Equestrian Monument of Marcus Aurelius II. Trajan’s Column in Rosso Antico Marble III. Trajan’s Column in Bronze IV. Flaminian Obelisk V. Roman Monuments VI. Models of Ancient Egyptian Obelisks, Made in England VII. Temple of Antoninus & Faustina VIII. Temple of Hercules Victor IX. Capitoline Wolf X. Temple of Sibyll and Tomb of Cecilia Metella XI. Arc de Triomphe, Luxor Obelisk and Colonne D’Austerlitz XII. Pantheon XIII. Baptistry, Pisa XIV. Temple of Hercules Victor, Temple of Vespasian and Colosseum XV. Temple of Castor & Pollux and Temple of Vespasian XVI. Cleopatra’s Needle, New York XVII. Column of Phocas XVIII. Giovanni Battista Piranesi XIX. Matthew Dubourg XX. Giovanni Ghisolfi XXI. Altri Due Capricci Envoy Pricing
Remembering the End of Eternity 18th & 19th Architectural Mementos of Ancient, Ruined Rome
As Rome’s republic waned, setting the stage for its imperial era, in 27 BCE, poet Albius Tibullus was the first to pair the city with the idea of eternity. “Romulus aeternae nondum formaverat urbis moenia”, he wrote – ‘Romulus had not yet built the walls of the eternal city’. The concept caught on. Soon, Livy and Ovid were writing of Rome’s eternity, as was Virgil, in his Aeneid, describing Jupiter’s ambitious outlook for the city –“imperium sin fine.” Then as now, estimating the duration of empire, especially “empire without end”, was a fraught undertaking, even for a god. Consider two recent, very much more modest, human forecasts - a German despot’s thousand year Reich, an American plutocrat’s American Century. When did the god’s ‘empire without end’ end? Edward “Decline and Fall” Gibbon proposes September 4, 476, the day the last Roman emperor was removed. In fact, the end was a drawn out affair. Beginning in 410, and over the course of the next 150 years, Rome was serially sacked by Visigoths (410), Vandals (455), and Ostrogoths (546). By the 7th century, writes one historian, mighty Rome had devolved into a “Byzantine rump state”. Further
sackings – in 846, 1084, and 1527 – followed; and little more than 15 centuries after Tibullus’ projection, the Eternal City lay literally shattered. What does this forlorn passage of ancient history have to do with the architectural mementos described in these pages? Very nearly everything. Not immediately, much-reduced, postImperial, post-Eternal Rome rebounded, though in very different directions, very often in league with an ascendant Church. By the later 17th century, re-made Rome had grown to become the mustsee destination for a new type of visitor, not traders or the faithful, not Vandals or Visigoths, but tourists, in ever increasing numbers, from across Europe (fig. 1). And while the city’s attractions included the then novel stylings of the Baroque, as well as more classically satisfying Renaissance achievements, the crowds craved ruined Rome; came for what Rome had been, much more than what it had become. Of course, the pairing of the city’s insistent, restive past and polished present provoked much of the place’s meaning; each bringing the other into sharper focus. Matters today are little different.
FIG. 1. “The Voyage of Italy or A Compleat Journey through Italy”, (1670) Richard Lassels.
These latest pilgrims, in the 17th and 18th centuries, were largely well-born English and French, young men whose home countries were at one apex or another of their own empires, though for both there were clouds on the horizon (and quite a lot closer); young men keenly aware of expectations that they would guide their empires forward.
summoning an altogether darker narrative. In ancient Rome, returning victorious generals were celebrated with parades, which, depending the extent of the triumph, might be very lavishly produced. In the midst of the adulation, a slave was tasked with repeatedly whispering in the honoree’s ear, “Memento mori, “ “Remember, you must die”- the prospect of death thought an antidote to hubris. With time, this original source for the Latin phrase was replaced by pictures and objects, whispers of a different type, often skulls and skeletons, insistently reminding us of our own mortality. (fig. 2) Whispers or bones, Rome’s ruins brought (and still bring) sobering attention to empires’ ends.
Two and three hundred years ago, what did they make of shattered Rome, of the not quite quiescent ruined remains? Of the Eternal City’s thoroughgoing, catastrophic undoing? Of the ground thick with ancient, broken, highly-colored marble shards. If a cautionary tale, what was the plot?
FIG. 2. Memento mori, Tomb of Cardinal Giuseppe Renato Imperiali (1742), San Agostino, Rome, by Paolo Posi
There was, of course, the place’s romance - a word originally describing the story of a hero’s adventures - whose early 14th century French roots reach to the ancient Latin Romanicus, meaning of or in the Roman style. Literally by definition, Rome is romantic. And yet, what many also saw in the ruins was less gauzily-focused, instead an admonitory, haunting panorama, an architectural landscape of memento mori,
The place’s portents are vividly reflected in the travel souvenirs with which tourists returned - a vast variety of objects, many nonetheless fixed on a single subject - the Eternal City in ruins. While this catalog largely features one type of these - antique models of the ancient monuments - savvy Roman sellers offered up identicallythemed architectural mementos across the range of fine and decorative arts, from the sublime to the base, from the most
accomplished ruins paintings by Panini and the era’s most precious, highly realized, and richly adorned architectural domestic and religious wares by Valadier, to street vendors’ simple daubings and indifferently crafted tourists’ souvenirs. In this period, in addition to pictures, Rome’s ruins were reproduced and marketed as mosaics and jewelry; drawings, etchings, and engravings; furniture, dishware, and metalwork; and all sorts of volumes, especially guidebooks; even fans, the fanciest of which might be decorated with images by leading artists of the Colosseum and ruined tombs and temples. (fig. 3) Still, the architectural models were
FIG. 4. A temple-form Byzantine saint’s reliquary (c 400), 5.5” h. x 8.5” x 5.5”
provided increasingly ornate and stately containers – reliquaries (fig. 4) – initially modeled, as so much in early Christian cosmology, on ancient Roman examples, often including temple forms, cinerary urns (fig. 5), and sarcophagi; though these soon developed along their own lines. Not all saintly relics found their way to the Churches, though, and there existed a substantial commercial trade in these sacred objects, which continues today.
FIG 3. Decorative fan with imaginary view of the Roman Forum, (c 1750), Gian Paolo Panini
(and are) especially prevalent, affective, to the point. Like all miniatures of great buildings, these mementos offer the thrilling, if illusory, experience of a place, all in a potent instant. The largely 19th century souvenir architectural models of ancient Rome, though, take matters a good deal farther, as we will see. In the early Middle Ages, the Roman Church’s interest in relics – saints’ remains, pieces of the True Cross, etc. – accelerated; and Pope Paul I, Bishop of Rome from 757 to 767, initiated their transfer from the city’s catacombs to its churches. Bits of bone and wood, unprepossessing in themselves, were
FIG.. 5. A temple-form Roman cinerary urn, (c 200), 10” x 10” x 7”
Like memento mori, reliquaries gain grave authority in their association with Death. Unlike them, though, reliquaries
authentically and intimately embody sacred mortality, and are objects of veneration. When we hold a reliquary (most are quite small) we hold a container of saintly remains, and are put in mind of their good works, associated miracles, and frequently with the earliest figures, circumstances of their martyrdom. Is it coincidence (or heresy) to imagine that antique architectural mementos of ruined Rome act is some of these same ways? An answer involves a digression regarding Roman building materials in the early empire. “ ‘I found a city of brick and left it a city of marble’, boasted Caesar Augustus. His feat is the more remarkable because, as a matter of fact, there was no marble anywhere near Rome”, wrote Henry Pullen, in Handbook of Ancient Roman Marbles (1894). Recent research suggests some distance between Augustus’ claim and the truth, especially the idea that the appearance of Rome was transformed; not the first or last instance of excess imperial self-regard. Still, the record of building projects undertaken by Augustus is extensive and nearly continuous across his 41 year reign (27 BCE – 14 CE). While the importation to Rome of some marbles from distant lands began as early as the 2nd century BCE, much of Augustus’ stone was quarried in Carrara; multi-ton blocks of the fine white stone loaded on ships at Luni, then rowed! 250 miles south to Rome. While Augustus’ preferred palette of marbles ran to the tastefully subdued, later in the first century CE, the city’s chromatic tastes became more, well, Roman. Think Nero’s (reigned 54-68 CE) Domus Aurea and Domitian’s (81-96) vast palace, sprawled across Rome’s Palatine Hill. This emperor’s
court poet, Statius, keenly aware of which side of his pane had been swathed in olive oil, flattered and fawned over a dinner’s opulent setting: These stones from the Libyan mountain gleam in competition with those from Troy; Marbles from Syene and Chios too, and rocks to rival the color of the green blue sea. Not coincidentally, the sources of all these richly-colored stones were then Roman colonies, and we can imagine this ornament possessed a different meaning for the emperor than for his poet (or for us). Nero and Domitian helped set the pace for the period’s voracious appetite for brightlycolored, highly-figured marbles, alabasters, granites and porphyries, quarried at the distant edges of the empire; including yellow-hued giallo antico marble from the province of Numidia, blood red rosso antico marble from Greece, and patterned, multicolor alabasters from Egypt. Pullen’s Handbook exaggerates “there does not exist a single slab, or column, or tiniest fragment of ancient marble in any church or gallery or workshop in Rome, which was not brought there expressly at fabulous expense, and at the cost of infinite labor, by the very same old Romans who built the Palaces of the Caesars, and the Baths of Caracalla, and the Colosseum.” After eleven centuries of assault, after the fall, Rome’s ground long lay thick with these colorful, broken stones. Beginning in the 17th century, and in full swing by the 19th, enterprising Romans developed new purposes for this antique rubble.
Not a square inch of rosso antico or of oriental alabaster is rooted up the garden of the Caesars, by the parasol of an English dilettante, but it is instantly carried to the Scarppellini ….. and it may happen that the fragment of a pedestal on which Titus has leaned will figure as a presse-papier on an English dressing-table, or be preserved in the model of the tomb of the Scipios or the sarcophagus of Cecilia Metella . Italy (1821) Connections between the subjects of these souvenirs and their materials were often made much of. One entrepreneurial scarpellino promised mementos made from the fabric of their subjects. Thus, a model of the Colosseum made from travertine chipped away from the ancient monument; a replica of the remains of the ruined Temple of Hercules Victor carved from a fragment of its antique, white, Greek marble columns; etc. Even when this correspondence of subject and material is less direct, almost without exception, this catalog’s souvenir stone ruin models are carved from Rome’s ruined stone remains. And thus the remarkable fact that, grasping these mementos, we hold in our hands the actual corpus of the Eternal City. Unlike the Roman church’s reliquaries – simple saintly relics held inside elaborate containers – these Roman architectural models are at once ancient remains and articulated vessel – both relic and reliquary. However, like their sacred counterparts, these architectural mementos immediately and intimately put us in mind of, literally in touch with, both a place’s particulars and empire’s end. And in this way, both memory and an ancient warning were (are) passed along.
Can we understand something of the visitors to the Eternal City, something of the city’s meaning for them, something of Rome’s romance, through their preferences with architectural knick-knacks? Is there a better way? Underlining 18th and 19th century tourists’ single-minded interests in ruined Rome are those places not worked up as mementos, including not a single Byzantine, gothic, or even romanesque monument; nothing neo-classical; with a single, ruleproving exception, (St. Peter’s), the city’s architectural mementos are baroque-free. When it comes to ancient Roman places, though, subjects abound – the Arches of Constantine, Septimius Severus, Titus, Drusus, and Janus; Temples of Vespasian, Castor and Pollux, Hercules, Portunus, Saturn and Vesta; Columns of Trajan, Marcus Aurelius, Phocas, and Mary; the Colosseum and Pantheon; Tombs of Scipio, Cecilia Metella, and Pyramid of Caius Cestius; Fountains of the Four Rivers, Navicella, and Dioscuri; Lateran, Flaminian, Solar, and Quirinal Obelisks; the Capitoline Wolf and Equestrian Statue of Marcus Aurelius. For 17th and 18th century French and English visitors to Rome, tourism’s delights were interwoven with dark, spectral warnings over the inevitable fate of empire – memento mori. By the mid-19th century the calculation changed, towards a Rome more romantic, less foreboding. For the time being, matters of empire were largely settled. With the opening of rail lines, Rome’s tourists were no longer strictly elites. And the supply of ancient stone was becoming played out. Still, even after midcentury, a visit to a scarpellino’s shop could yield a range of architectural mementos, a shopping spree apparently portent-free.
My companion reaped an ample harvest of antique monuments, reduced to citizen proportions. He bought two Colisseums, one Arch of Titus, one Trajan’s Column, four obelisks, and one Tomb of the Scipios. Rome of Today (1861) (fig.6).
“Pestilence and famine contributed to fill up the measure of the calamities of Rome,” notes Decline and Fall. During the three great imperial plagues, of the 2nd, 3rd, and 6th centuries, millions perished. Between 400 and 800 CE, precipitated by disease, the population of Rome was reduced 90 percent. By the middle of the 19th century, though, this had become a matter of intermittent memory, if thought of at all. Current events illustrate how quickly our understandings of a place may change; how the identical ancient ruined Roman monument may mean one thing one day, something very different a little later. Hasn’t Rome resumed its very long familiar role as cautionary tale, though with a novel twist - a great, imperious, often thought impervious, power wounded, lurching, brought low; its citizens staggered, wondering their place in the onrush of events, at the end of eternity? As a consequence, for the observant, haven’t Roman architectural mementos changed along these same lines, their meanings and incitements shifted, more reliquary and memento mori, less souvenir of some sunny afternoon passed in some pleasant piazza? In the future, what will these models cause us to recall? How will we remember the end of eternity? FIG. 6. (opposite) “He bought two Colisseums, one Arch of Titus, one Trajan’s Column, four obelisks, and one Tomb of the Scipios.”
I. Equestrian Monument of Marcus Aurelius 22-1/2�h, c 1830, patinated bronze on a carved, possibly ancient Carrara marble base, incised with Latin text, with bronze mounts See Pricing. A large, particularly fine model of the ancient Roman equestrian monument to Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, situated (grudgingly) by Michelangelo to the center of his surpassing rearrangement of Rome’s Campidoglio, and resplendent atop a high base designed by the Mannerist genius.
II. Trajan’s Column in Rosso Antico Marble 30-1/2”h., c 1830, rosso antico marble on graduated, stepped rosso and nero antico base, surmounted by a gilded bonze figure of the Emperor See Pricing. At the same time Hopfgarten and Jollage (see III.) were casting their remarkable bronze architectural models, other Roman decorative arts workshops were producing the same subjects, but in the more traditional materials of the city’s stone trade. This very large, very carefully carved replica of Trajan’s Column is in rosso antico marble, an ancient stone brought to Rome from Greece perhaps in the 2nd century CE. As discussed earlier, after Rome’s fall, the ground was littered with colorful shards of imported marbles, which, by the 17th century, were being gathered and worked into tourists’ mementos, among a variety of decorative objects.
III. Trajan’s Column in Bronze 35-3/4”h., c 1830, patinated bronze on a graduated, stepped giallo di Siena marble base See Pricing. In Rome in the first part of the 19th century, while there were several decorative arts workshops crafting work at a very high level (especially that headed by Guiseppe Valadier), just one of these focused on the production of souvenir architectural models. Wilhelm Hopfgarten and Ludwig Jollage were Prussian emigres who reached the city by 1803, and were highly skilled bronze casters. Their talent was such that they cast work for famed Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen, among others; and counted Popes and Cardinals among their clients. The firm cast large, very highly detailed models of a variety of the city’s ancient monuments, including the Trajan and Antonine Columns, Marcus Aurelius Equestrian monument, Arch of Constantine, and Egyptian obelisks in the Piazzas di San Giovanni Laterano and del Popolo. Interestingly and distinctively, the firm’s models picture these monuments as they appeared in antiquity, not the 19th century. Thus, their very fine, gilded model of the Arch of Constantine includes the monument’s long-lost sculptural group of horsemen and charioteers atop the roof. The present, very large, detailed model of Trajan’s Column is characteristic of the Prussians’ exacting work. It’s provenance includes Prince and Princess Henry de la Tour d’Avergne Lauraguais (Sotheby’s 3 May 2012 sale, Lot 78, 51,650 GBP).
IV. Flaminian Obelisk 22”h., c 1830, rosso antico and nero antico marble, incised with hieroglyphics and Latin text See Pricing. There are more ancient Egyptian obelisks in Rome than in Egypt, all brought there at the direction of Roman emperors, later re-worked by Roman Popes. With this impressively-sized, very carefullycarved model of the Flaminian Obelisk, in Piazza del Popolo, the monolith’s hieroglyphics are accurately inscribed into the shaft. At the base, gold paste-filled Latin inscriptions are a shorthand for more lengthy, 17th century honorifics. The model’s material – rosso antico marble, originally quarried in Greece, perhaps in the 2nd century CE – recalls the red Aswan granite from which the ancient obelisk was carved, thirty three hundred years ago.
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V. Roman Monuments i. Trajan and Antonine Columns, 16”h., c 1830, rosso antico marble incised with Latin text bronze mounts ii. Lateran Obelisk, 15-3/4”h., c 1860, nero antico marble incised with Latin text and Egyptian hieroglyphics iii. Trajan’s Column, 12-3/4”h., 1830, rosso antico marble incised with Latin text, nero antico base, bronze mount See Pricing. One way of dating Roman souvenir architectural models across the 19th century is with their materials. Generally, those in ancient red marble (rosso antico, quarried in Greece and Turkey) were crafted c 1820 - 1840, when the marble was more abundant. As it became scarcer, production shifted to black marble (nero antico, quarried in Greece) then to yellow marble (giallo antico quarried in Tunisia), and towards century’s end, to Italian alabaster from Volterra.
VI. Models of Ancient Egyptian Obelisks, Made in England i. Cleopatra’s Needle, 14-1/2”h., 1830s, Ashford black marble ii Goshen Obelisk, 19-3/4”h., 1830s, Ashford black marble iii. Bankes’ Obelisk, 20” h., 1830s, Ashford black marble See Pricing. Beginning c 1830, inspired by Roman examples, there began English production of models of ancient Egyptian obelisks, including the three described here. These were made not of colored marbles or bronze, but in so-called Ashford black marble, quarried in Derbyshire. Interest in these miniatures peaked, of course, with the 1878 arrival in London of Cleopatra’s Needle. All are carefully rendered, the hieroglyphics realized with stencils and application of fluoric or muriatic acid. The tiny Greek writing to the base of Bankes’ Obelisk, brought to England in 1821, is very fine. The crucial role this monument played, along with the Rosetta Stone, in deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics is largely forgotten.
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far left: Cleopatra’s Needle, detail left: Goshen Obelisk, detail right: Bankes’ Obelisk, detail
VII. Temple of Antoninus & Faustina 4-1/4�h., c 1850, patinated bronze, giallo antico marble base See Pricing. The scarcest of the souvenir architectural mementos offered in this catalog; we’ve seen just two. Interestingly, the other example features eight, rather than the six columns this model correctly includes. The two models rear stonework panels are also reversed. Again, the present model is the more accurate. These differences illustrate something of how these models were assembled – individually cast parts brazed together prior to finishing.
VIII. Temple of Hercules Victor
i. 8”h., c 1860, patinated bronze, Portoro marble ii. 5” h., c 1850, patinated bronze, giallo antico marble iii. 4”h.,1870s, patinated bronze, giallo antico marble iv. 3-3/4”h., 1870s, patinated bronze, Belgian black marble v. 3-1/2”h., 1880s, patinated bronze, Belgian black marble vi. 3-1/4”h.,1880s, patinated bronze, Belgian black marble See Pricing.
Why are some souvenirs so successful? “Of all the monuments of ancient Rome, this (Tomb of Scipio) is the one more frequently produced in marble or bronze than any other, except perhaps the Temple of Vesta (mistaken name for the present memento)” records Rome and Its Ruins (1866). With each model, the center, shallow, conical section of the roof lifts away, perhaps for use as an inkwell.
left: i., detail above: period inscription to base of iii right (above): ii., detail
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IX. Capitoline Wolf 6� h.; c 1850; patinated cast bronze on an ancient alabastro fiorito base See Pricing. For Austrialia, it’s the kangaroo; for the Czech Republic, the double-tailed lion; for Russia, the double-headed eagle; etc. No place, though, is symbolized by an animal playing so central a role in its founding as Rome. Ask Romulus and Remus, saved from drowning in the Tiber by the she-wolf, who sustained the twins. This impressively-sized, extremely detailed model of the medieval, or is it Etruscan? (and aren’t the children Renaissance?) statue stands today in Palazzo dei Conservatore on the Campidoglio. The figures rest upon a slab of ancient, highly-figured, a stone prized in
Renaissance inlay work called commesso.
X. Temple of the Sibyll & Tomb of Cecilia Metella i. Temple of Sibyll, 4”h., 1860s, patinated bronze, Belgian black marble ii.Tomb of Cecilia Metella, 3-1/2 h., 1860s, patinated bronze, giallo antico marble See Pricing. Perhaps the relative scarcity of these mementos is explained by their locations – overlooking the cascade at Tivoli, and out along the Appian Way – unlike the Temple of Hercules Victor which is towards the center of Rome. The Temple of the Sibyll, especially, was a favored subject of another type of souvenir maker – romantic view painters of the 18th and early 19th centuries.
i. Temple of the Sibyll
ii. Tomb of Cecilia Metella
left: Arc de Triomphe right: Obelisque du Luqsor, far right: Colonne d’Austerlitz
XI. Arc de Triomphe, Obelisque du Luqsor, Colonne d ‘Austerlitz i. Arc de Triomphe, 4-3/4” h., c 1870, patinated bronze, marked “Massin, Paris foundry” ii. Luxor Obelisk, 11-3/4” h., c 1860, patinated bronze, Belgian black marble iii. Colonne d’Austerlitz, 10-1/2” h., c. 1860, patinated bronze, Belgian black marble See Pricing. The neo-classicizing taste for ancient Roman monuments spread wide in the later 18th and 19th centuries. Paris, between 1806 and 1833, saw the building of three landmarks closely modeled on Eternal City prototypes – Arc de Triomphe (Arch of Titus), Colonne Vendome (Trajan’s Column), and Luxor Obelisk (inspired by any number of ancient Egyptian monoliths uprooted, then placed in Rome) In this way, aren’t all three monuments souvenirs of Rome; and aren’t all three of these models souvenirs of souvenirs?
XII. Pantheon 4” h.; c 1870s; tinted Volterran alabaster on an alabaster base See Pricing. While we think of ancient Roman monuments as immutable, many have changed and not so long ago. Occasionally, these differences help us date their souvenirs. In the 17th century, a pair of bell towers was added to the front of the Pantheon. Unloved, they came to be known as the “asses ears”, their design atrributed to Bernini. (In fact, their architect was Carlo Maderno.) In 1883, or 1892, or the 1870s, depending upon which history we believe, they were removed. This unusually large, carefully rendered, souvenir likeness of the Pantheon is without bell towers, and our first instinct would be to date it after 1883, or after 1892, or after the 1870’s, depending upon which history we believe. However, this model, owing to its materials – color-tinted alabaster from Volterra – almost certainly dates to the 1870’s. We’ve not seen any 19th century stone model of the building including the twin towers (there are examples in bronze); perhaps they proved difficult to carve. Bernini did play a role with the Pantheon, though, directing the removal of ancient bronze coffering from the underside of the porch to be employed in his baldacchino at St. Peter’s. About this episode, Bernini apologists demur. Rome’s greatest baroque designer played a similar role with the Colosseum, a building operated by the Papacy as a quarry (for a thousand years!), in consequence of which the immense structure we see today is barely onethird its original size. Where did Bernini obtain the travertine for his colonnade at St. Peter’s? Don’t ask.
XIII. Baptistry, Pisa 13-1/2”h.,1870’s, carved alabaster, repaired See Pricing. Neither Roman, nor a ruin, the material of this Pisan architectural memento – alabaster quarried in nearby Volterra – was in use with models in Rome, Florence, Pisa, and elsewhere by the third quarter of the 19th century. When we think of Italian alabaster, what may come to mind is the soft, granular, bright white stone from which souvenir knick-knacks were crudely carved into the 20th century. In fact, the Volterran quarries, first set to use by the Etruscans, offered a wide range of colored alabasters. One mid-19th century catalog lists forty different types. This very large, highly-detailed, intricately-carved model of Pisa’s 14th century Baptistry, is assembled from at least three different varieties of alabaster – translucent white forms the base; red and yellow veined stone the walls; grey alabaster the dome. Still, souvenir sellers sought the rich patina of ancient Roman marbles, though rendered in this far less costly material. Towards this, they devised an unusual finish, “An artificial polish is given by the application with a woolen cloth of a paste compounded of bone-dust and common soap,” notes Stone Magazine (1895).
XIV. Temple of Hercules Victor, Temple of Vespasian, Colosseum i. Temple of Hercules Victor, 3-1/4”h., c. 1890, alabaster ii. Temple of Vespasian, 4-1/2”h., c. 1890, tinted alabaster iii. Colosseum 2-3/4 ”h., c. 1890, alabaster See Pricing.
Towards the end of the 19th century, the materials available to earlier stone carvers – richly colored, ancient marble fragments with which the ground of the Eternal city was once covered – were largely played out. Tourists had changed, too; no longer strictly English and French elites, but larger numbers of visitors of more modest means, and many Americans; and fewer who saw in Rome’s past a premonition of their own future.
i. Temple of Hercules Victor
ii. Temple of Vespasian
iii. Colosseum
XV. Temples of Castor and Pollux & Vespasian 13-1/4”h.,c 1880s, tinted and untinted Italian alabaster See Pricing Almost all of Rome’s souvenir architectural models were offered on their own – a replica of the Pantheon, perhaps, or of the Colosseum. There are two exceptions to this rule. Mementos of Trajan’s Column were
often paired with that of Marcus Aurelius; the Temple of Castor and Pollux offered alongside that of Vespasian. This pair, turned out in Italian alabaster, tinted to resemble marble, is modeled on nearly identical groups produced beginning c 1830, and carved in ancient marbles, including rosso antico and giallo antico.
XVI. Cleopatra’s Needle, New York 15-1/4”h., c 1881, patinated bronze, glass thermometer, by Tiffany & Co. See Pricing. There are, as noted elsewhere, more ancient Egyptian obelisks in Rome than in Egypt. In the 19th century, it was time for newer empires to take up where Rome had left off. France moved first, bringing an ancient obelisk from Luxor to Paris in 1833. England followed suit in 1878; the United States in 1881. This very highly-realized bronze souvenir of the installation of Cleopatra’s Needle in Central Park was commissioned of Tiffany & Co. by Lieutenant Commander Henry Gorringe. Hired by tycoon William Vanderbilt, Gorringe had retrieved the 200 ton token from Alexandria. lower left: Dedicatory text at underside
XVII. Column of Phocas 29”h., c 1880, giallo antico marble, nero antico marble, bronze mount See Pricing. The last monument built in the Roman Forum celebrated not a Roman, but a Byzantine emperor – Flavius Phocas, who reigned from 602 to 610. This was a catch-as-catchcan landmark – the column salvaged from another building, built atop the foundation of a previous monument, the dedicatory inscription on the base written over an earlier text. Even the now absent figure atop the Column may have been re-purposed. So why was this monument so often the subject of architectural mementos? Part of the answer may be with that inscription, about which there was a now difficult to understand excitement when it was re-discovered in the early 19th century.
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XVIII. Giovanni Battista Piranesi (Venice 1720 – 1778 Rome) i. Imaginary Architectural Composition with Ionic Order, 20-3/4”x 15-1/4” image, 1765, etching on laid paper with full margins ii. Plan and Elevation of Tuscan Temple, 23-2/3” x 15-3/4”image, 1765, etching on laid paper with full margins iii. Sezione per lungo …., 16-1/2” x 24.25”image, 1762, etching on laid paper with full margins See Pricing. Erratic and quarrelsome, genius etcher, homicidally-inclined hothead, first and most important architectural preservationist (without him, today’s Rome would be a vastly different place); architectural knight errant (literally - he was knighted by Pope Clement XII in 1766); family man (unless new copper printing plates needed paying for, then his wife and children went cold, hungry) - Piranesi was the most important, tendentious and persuasive, difficult, revelatory, extraordinary architectural image maker of the 18th century. The first two of his etchings here are the result of a 1764 dust-up with the French art historian/ collector/connoisseur Pierre-Jean Marriette, who’d objected (in print!) to one of Piranesi’s mistaken historical theories. These two etchings form part of the artist’s rebuttal. The ‘imaginary architectural composition with Ionic Order’, unlike any Ionic building ever, features a Latin inscription within the central tabula ansata – ‘So as not to make this sublime art into a vile profession where one would only copy without choosing’ Okay, Pierre-Jean!? The third etching from De due Spelenche degli Antichi … (1762) imparts a good deal of architectural drama to a cave, 15 miles south of Rome, ornamented millenia ago.
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XIX. Matthew Dubourg (1786 – 1838) 12-1/4” x 15”sheet, 8-3/4” x 12”plate, typical, 1820, hand-colored aquatints on wove paper i. The Coloseum ii. Baths of Dioclesian iii. Arch of Septimimus Severus iv. Temple of Jupiter Tonans v. Temple of the Dea Tussis vi. Grotto of Egeria vii. Temple of Janus Quadrifrons viii. Temple of Pallas See Pricing. Views of the Remains of Ancient Buildings in Rome and its Vicinity was published in London in 1820, and includes 26 beautifully tinted images, from which the eight here are taken. As Dubourg notes in the book’s introduction “… there cannot be offered to the public a work more interesting or more worthy of its patronage, than a selection of Views of Temples, Baths, Triumphal Arches, and other magnificent remains of ancient Roman buildings, from the work of the justly celebrated PIRANESI.” It is well that Dubourg offers this sincere flattery, as several of his views are very close to those of Piranesi, who had died in 1778.
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To be fair, even with nearly identical views, the two pursue different purposes. Piranesi’s are less lovely, more artistic and bracing, populated by Roman denizens we might cross the via to avoid. Dubourg’s beautiful, highly saturated colorful pictures, inhabited by the well-to-do and, often enough, farmyard animals, are invitations, travel pictures in their way. In this, it appears Dubourg continued along the crowd-pleasing lines of an earlier project, with which he had assisted his brother (or father?), Richard. In 1807, in London, was Dubourg’s Museum, whose catalog is titled Exhibition of the Models of the Remains of Capital Buildings in and Near Rome … The show included a large group of cork models of the ancient monuments, as well as a working model of Mt. Vesuvius. During a performance, the volcano’s red hot ‘lava’ followed an unanticipated path, and Dubourg’s Museum was incarcerated. Book publishing, which so well features Matthew Dobourg’s talents, must have seemed to him an altogether safer bet.
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XX. Giovanni Ghisolfi (Milan 1623 – 1683) 29-1/2” x 38-1/2”; 1660s; oil on canvas See Pricing. The influence of some painters on later artists may be just as important as their own work. Towering, 20th century Art Historian Rudolf Wittkower writes of Giovanni Ghisolfi, “… he made his fortune as Italy’s first painter of views with fanciful ruins. These views – called capricci or vedute ideate – became a distinct genre in Italian painting, stretching over a century and a half.” Adds Wittkower, “Rome had at least one great master (Gian Paolo Panini) who raised both the vedute esatte and vedute ideate (exact and imaginary views) to the level of great art …. (O)ne cannot doubt that he received vital impulses (fig. 1) from the precise art of Giovanni Ghisolfi, whose vedute ideate show the characteristically Roman scenic arrangements of ruins.” Just how “vital” were these “impulses”? About as vital as a wallet to a pickpocket. Note the following images of a Ghisolfi painting alongside the younger Panini’s later sketch. The present picture, apparently from mid-career, has a very close counterpart in the Museo Reale, Copenhagen, at Castello Fredericksburg (fig. 2), where it is mis-attributed to Viviano Codazzi. Andrea Busiri Vici’s Ghiovanni Ghisolfi (1992) includes an image of the Danish picture.
Fig. 2..(below), Giovanni Ghisolfi - the “vital impulse� for a sketch by Gian Paolo Panini (above)
Fig. 1.(below), The present picture. (above) The closely related picture in Museo Reale, Copenhagen, misattributed to Vivianno Codazi.
XXI. Altri Due Capricci i. Circle of Jacob Saeys (1658 – 1726) Flemish, 28” x 22-1/2”, late 17th century, oil on canvas ii. French School. 16” x 11-1/2”, mid-18th century, oil on canvas See Pricing. Early 17th century Baroque Rome saw the development of a new type of painting – the capriccio – pictures whose attention turned to the city’s ancient, ruined monuments, rather than, as previously, those who lived (and posed) amongst them. These canvases’ narrative direction and force are set in motion by Architecture, while people play a supporting role, miniscule humans emphasizing the enormity of Roman remains. The capriccio form attracted the range of Italy’s (and other countries’) most talented artists, including Canaletto and Francesco Guardi and the genre’s most accomplished and successful painter, Gian Paolo Panini. While other capriccio painters’ subjects varied between realistic and imaginary views, Panini invented a third way – realistic views of the the most well-known ruins nonetheless placed in imaginary relation to each other. These were highly prized by tourists visiting Rome in the mid-18th century. All these pictures may be “read” along a line – the pathos of the reduced present amplified by the past’s splendor at one end; humanity’s remarkable tenacity, surviving the great traumas which’ve brought low magnificent empire, on the other end – a line, then running roughly from despair to hope. For us today, the question is of our place along this line and the jury is still out. Vulnerabilities to cataclysm, of one kind or another, underline the ways in which our lives now are not very different from those illustrated in these paintings, beginning 400 years ago – not very different from those tiny people making their way amongst the ruins. Large forces, set free, are now at work; the path and plan of civilization hardly clear.
i. Circle of Jacob Saeys (1658 - 1726), Flemish
28� x 22-1/2�, late 17th century, oil on canvas. Towards the close of the 17th century, capricci painters were no longer only Italian. Will benefit from a cleaning.
ii. French School
16� x 11-1/2�, mid-18th century, oil on canvas The composition follows Panini, best known of the Roman capriccio painters.
Envoy
Ancient Rome is very much in the news. Not for any sensational archaeological discovery, or fresh historical insight, but in its very old (nearly ancient) familiar role as metaphor, as cautionary tale. Timesman Paul Krugman has offered What Did the Romans Ever Do For Us? (described by him as an “itch to scratch … about Roman history, with relevance to current events”): Fall of the American Empire; and Trump Makes Caligula Look Pretty Good. Professional basketball coach Greg Popovich is more succinct - “My final conclusion is, my big fear is - we are Rome”.
Among the culprits, Gibbon (fig. 2) suggested, were Roman politicians’ too cozy relationships with the empire’s too large, too influential army. In ancient Rome, an emperor might be a general, a general an emperor.
Are we? The analogy is hardly new, and has been posed to a variety of audiences. We have speculated here at the portentious effects of ruined Rome on French and English tourists in the 18th and 19th centuries, when their countries aspired to empire. Edward Gibbon’s 1776 History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (fig. 1), a timely title aimed at British audiences and empire, was written in a year of colonial revolt.
FIG 1.Title Page, History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, (1776-86) by Edward Gibbon
rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist” Remember that the author was both a president and general. Just as Gibbon considered Rome’s ruin through the lens of threatened British empire, some modern historians take up this ancient question with the most up-to-the-minute reference points. The Fate of Rome – Climate, Disease & the End of an Empire (2017), by Kyle Harper, notes the correspondence of the prosperity of the late Republic and early empire with benign weather, providing plentiful water and abundant crops. The fifth century, on the other hand, included a decade of nearby ferocious volcanic activity, bringing on the Late Antique Little Ice Age, setting off the Justinian Plague of 541-542, bringing death to perhaps half the population. “… the deterioration of the physical climate coincided with unprecedented biological catastrophe to overwhelm what was left of the Roman state, “writes Harper. FIG.2 . Portrait of Gibbon, frontispiece, History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. With the American Revolution, guess which side Gibbon took. After Gibbon refused dinner with Benjamin Franklin, the American suggested a new title and offered to provide “materials to so excellent a writer for the Decline and Fall of the British Empire”.
Nearly 250 years on, Gibbon’s theme is taken up, in considerable detail, in The Storm Before the Storm – the Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic (2017), by Mike Duncan, who chronicles the corrosive effects of 500 years of political and military intriguing, leading, in 27 BC, to the Republic’s end and beginnings of the Roman empire. How different is this than the impetus for Eisenhower’s warning, 60 years ago, “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence ….. by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous
This, the third and concluding plague to devastate the empire, was preceded by the Plague of Cypress, 249-262 CE, and Antonine Plague, 165-180 CE, named for the emperor at the time – Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. This pandemic, likely smallpox, began in China, spreading along the Silk Road trade route and by ship to Rome, where up to a third of the empire’s population succumbed. Almost of course, at the time, the epidemiological facts of the plague were largely set aside in favor of a fiction - that Lucius Veres, a general and co-emperor, had violated a tomb, releasing the disease, which was a retribution for sacrilege. Aurelius, (last of the so-called “Five Good Emperors, a dubious honorificbestowed thirteen centuries later, by Niccolo “It is Nearly marked “Massin, Paris foundry”marked marked “Massin, Paris foundry” “Massin, Paris foundrymarked “Massin, Paris
better to be feared than loved” Machiavelli. His understanding of “Good” is not universally agreed), whose equestrian monument in the Campidoglio , among the models described in these pages (fig.3), perished in the last year of the plague bearing his name.
FIG.3. Equestrian Monument of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, patinated bronze, carrara marble base, c 1830.
In ancient Rome, plagues were named after those who chronicled them, and those then in power. Until recently, modern viruses have often taken the names of places associated with them – the Ebola River, city of Marburg, Spain, etc.. In time, should we revert to the Roman model, perhaps we’ll re-name COVID-19.
Are we Rome? We’ve noted that there are more ancient Egyptian obelisks in Rome than Egypt, each brought to the Eternal City by an Emperor, later repositioned by a Pope. In the 19th century, Egyptian obelisks were thought a desirable adornment of empire, and examples made their way to Paris, London and New York. Among the most exactingly-realized models described here is a bronze of Cleopatra’s Needle in Central Park, cast by Tiffany & Co. in 1881 (fig. 4) commemorating the monolith’s installation. The only ancient, emigrant Egyptian obelisk to find its way to the New World rises atop a slight hill, behind the Met, in Central Park. Fashioned of red granite from Aswan, it was first installed in Heliopolis 3,500 years ago, on the order of a Pharaoh (Thutmos III, son of Thutmose II). Fifteen centuries later, in 12 AD, Egyptian dominion vanquished and Rome’s ascendant, an Emperor (Caesar Augustus, adopted son of Julius Caesar) directed the shaft be floated down the Nile to Alexandria, capital of the then Roman province, Aegyptus. In 1880, financed by a new species of potentate (tycoon William Vanderbilt, son of the Commodore) the Needle set sail for Gotham. By 2011, Zahi Hawass, then SecretaryGeneral for Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, citing the monument’s neglect, demanded its return. The Big Apple declined; and the Obelisk’s third re-location was, for the moment, forestalled. Should New York’s Needle (a landmark, by the way, unrelated to the Queen of the Nile) yet again demonstrate expectation-defying get-up-and-go, it likely won’t be in Egypt’s direction, but the other way. History points in the direction of Beijing, not Alexandria or Heliopolis. And after some centuries decorating Tianenmen Square, where next?
Empires come and go, but are we Rome; is Rome’s fate our own? Isn’t the question mistaken, presumptuous? Were we ever Rome? What ancient, ruined Rome offers us today is very much the same it has provided others, over the past 15 centuries – a cautionary tale – an anxious story reimagined, re-purposed, re-worked; brought up-to-date by a succession of empires, actual and would be, in ways large and small, for purposes profound and trivial. We are not the first to ask if we are Rome. Historically, the question seems most often posed by empires a little long in the tooth, as though the asking of it suggests the likely answer. What matters most about ancient, ruined Rome is what we now make of it, our fleeting memories of the Eternal City, incited, inflected by the place’s range of provocations – history and myth, artifact and romantic ruin, art and architecture grand and grandiloquent, sublime and grotesque, timeless and ephemeral. In matters of memory, mustn’t we remember Marcel Proust “But when from a long distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile and more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls remembering, waiting, hoping, among the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the sad structure of recollection”? ‘Taste and smell alone’ and architectural mementos of ancient, ruined Rome.
FIG 4. Cleopatra’s Needle, Central Park, bronze, Tiffany & Co., 1881.
Pricing
I. Equestrian Monument of Marcus Aurelius USD 12,500 II. Trajan’s Column in Rosso Antico Marble 20,000 III. Trajan’s Column in Bronze 22,500 IV. Flaminian Obelisk 12,500 V. Roman Monuments i. Trajan and Antonine Columns (16” h.) 12,500 ii. Lateran Obelisk 5.000 iii. Trajan’s Column (12-3/4”) 5,000 VI. Models of Ancient Egyptian Obelisks, Made in England i. Cleopatra’s Needle 2,500 ii. Goshen Obelisk 7,500 iii. Bankes’ Obelisk 5,000 VII. Temple of Antoninus & Faustina 10,000 VIII. Temple of Hercules Victor i. 8” 12,500 ii. 5” 7,500 iii. 4” 1,500 iv. 3-3/4” 750 v. 3-1/2” 750 vi. 3-1/4” 750 IX. Capitoline Wolf 7,500 X. Temple of Sibyll and Tomb of Cecilia Metella i. Temple of Sibyll, Tivoli 3,000 ii. Tomb of Cecilia Metella 3,000 XI. Arc de Triomphe, Luxor Obelisk and Colonne D’Austerlitz i. Arc de Triomphe 1,500 ii. Luxor Obelisk 750 iii. Colonne d’Austerlitz 750 XII. Pantheon 4,500 XIII. Baptistry, Pisa 6,000 XIV. Temple of Hercules Victor, Temple of Vespasian and Colosseum 2,500 XV. Temple of Castor & Pollux and Temple of Vespasian (pair) 5,000 XVI. Cleopatra’s Needle, New York 15,000 XVII. Column of Phocas 7,500 XVIII. Giovanni Battista Piranesi i. Imaginary Architectural Composition with Ionic Order 750 ii. Plan and Elevation of Tuscan Temple 750 iii. Sezione per lungo ..... 1,250 XIX. Matthew Dubourg, 8 prints 2,500 XX. Giovanni Ghisolfi 20,000 XXI. Altri Due Capricci i. Capriccio, Circle of Jacob Sayes 3,500 ii. Capriccio, Roman School 2,500
For further information, please be in touch - lucia@piraneseum.com, tel. 510 332 3218. Visit piraneseum.com. Subject to prior sale. Exclusive of sales and all other taxes, as applicable, shipping, and insurance. For recommended shippers, please inquire.
These pages - Detail of Ghisolfi capriccio Back cover - Detail of stereoview of Benedetto Boschetti’s display in the Roman Court at London’s International Exhibition, 1862, showing the very talented Roman decorative artist’s large and remarkable models of the Temple of Castor and Pollux, Column of Phocas and Temple of Vespasian, carved in giallo antico marble.
