Top 5 at the Capitoline Museums

A few days after my visit to the Forum, I returned to the Piazza di Campidoglio to visit the Capitoline Museums, which together, in my estimation, are very close to being on par with the astonishing British Museum. Below are the five exhibits I spent the most time with on my first foray.

1. Bernini’s Medusa (Palazzo dei Conservatori)

A Hollywood actress could practice for a thousand years in front of a mirror and never for a frame achieve the cocktail of emotions present in this sculpture’s expression; nor a writer describe them. Horror, pain, bemusement, fear, anger and seductiveness – they’re all there. This is, I suppose, how she turns you to stone – the irony being that in this case, she is actually made of the stuff.

This is probably the work that held my attention the longest. What’s more, it’s helping me learn the difference between your dime-a-dozen sculptures (which are still good), and your absolute masterpieces (I haven’t yet seen Michelangelo’s Pieta at St. Peters, or Bernini’s Rape of Proserpine at the Museo Borghese, but have high expectations).

2. The Dying Galatian (Palazzo Nuovo)

Another sculpture, probably more famous than Bernini’s Medusa (above). A strong gladiator, having just received a fatal, piercing stab wound to the ribs, lies fallen, propped up on one hand as he looks to the earth, contemplating his imminent death (not my photo).

Lord Byron wrote of the statue in the fourth canto of his poem, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, noticing the staunch resistance to agony in the dying man’s expression, and imagining him in the ‘arena’ of the Coliseum as it ‘swims around him’:

I see before me the gladiator lie:
He leans upon his hand – his manly brow
Consents to his death, but conquers agony.
And his drooped head sinks low, –
And through his side the last drops, ebbing slow
From the red gash, fall heavy; and now
The arena swims around him – he is gone,
Ere ceased the human shout which hailed the wretch who won.

(from Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrammage, Canto IV)

When the American writer and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson saw the statue fifteen years after Byron’s poem was published, he couldn’t get past Byron’s famous lines: ‘The Dying Gladiator is a most expressive statue, but it will always be indebted to the muse of Byron for fixing upon it forever his pathetic thought.’ Neither, of course, could I.

3. The Hall of the Emperors / The Hall of the Philosophers (Palazzo Nuovo)

There are a few rooms in the Palazzo Nuovo that contain nothing but ancient marble busts of ancient dignitaries, and two of these rooms struck me particularly forcefully. The Hall of the Emperors was the one that made me shiver… when you walk in you are suddenly surrounded by virtually every man who ever ruled Rome, from the kind gaze of Vespasian, to the moody frown of Caracalla, to the thoughtful concern of Marcus Aurelius… uurgh.

Secondly, the Hall of the Philosophers, which also includes writers (Homer, Sophocles etc.). This is similarly eerie. There are a handful of similar busts in the British Museum (first post of this blog) but there must be about forty in this room.

4. D’Arpino’s frescoes (Palazzo dei Conservatori)

This is the only one of my top five that isn’t a work of sculpture. Don’t get me wrong, there is an extensive collection of paintings in these museums, with a few of the superstars, two Carravaggios that I saw, and a Rubens, for instance. Also a massive, three-storey tall Baroque altarpiece by Guercino. But the museum is really about the plastic, so to speak.

However, the frescoes in the first room you walk into caught my imagination, and I spent some time in this room. The walls are very large, with six frescoes altogether, two on each side wall, and one at each end, all depicting the founding of Rome. Each of the frescoes is perhaps seven or eight meters in length, maybe four meters high. Death features prominently; there are some enormous battle-scenes, horses’ eyes bulging, countless men clutching spears in their chests, everyone clambering over each other, the action happening in very close proximity, and at full tilt. Think Braveheart on pause, just as the armies are clashing, so you can study the expression on each crazed individual’s face.

5. Fragments of a Colossus: Constantine the Great

In the first courtyard of the museum there is a foot, an elbow, a hand, parts of two legs and a head (photo above, not mine) – all once presumably belonging to a colossal statue of the emperor who made Christianity the official Roman religion, and shifted the capital to modern day Turkey etc. The toes on the feet are about the length of your arm, and the size of your torso. It would be nice to see the thing whole, but it’s kind of fitting that it’s all in pieces.