jere7my | Musei Capitolini

Saturday, June 27 - Rome

I hope y'all are enjoying these photo posts, because I've now uploaded a solid 18% of my pictures. Whoo-boy! This set is from the Capitoline Museums, which are packed full of classical treasures — like the remarkable Dying Gaul with his broken sword, above, about which Byron wrote
He leans upon his hand—his manly brow
Consents to death, but conquers agony,
And his drooped head sinks gradually low—
And through his side the last drops, ebbing slow
From the red gash, fall heavy, one by one.
The museums are contained in two buildings cupped like parentheses around the Piazza del Campidoglio on the Capitoline. A subterranean passage links them, and to judge by the echoing silence therein I suspect most tourists experience museum fatigue after the first, and never find their way to the second. The museums are built around structures left in situ — the massive foundations of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus stick up through the floors at one point, and you can take a glass-walled elevator ride through the stratae of an excavation.

This was the first time I learned that two fully-charged camera batteries are not sufficient for a day in Rome. But I did get a goodly number of photos.

The equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius in the Piazza del Campidoglio, which stands in the center of a cool geometric pavement. This is the copy; the original is inside:

I am told there may have once been a statue of a cowering barbarian under the hoof; this is more or less from his POV.

The colossal head of Constantine! Eight feet tall!

The colossal hand of Constantine!

The colossal knee of Constantine!

The colossal toes of Constantine!

Sadly for the ladies, most of his other colossal bits did not survive.

The Capitoline Wolf, emblem of Rome. The babies were a medieval addition, and there's a big controversy over whether the wolf herself is ancient or medieval.

Sometimes being a sculptor in ancient Rome was not glamorous.

Cupid and Psyche.

The younger Furietti Centaur, with boar skin.

This is a fragment of a temple from the pre-Republic era, which makes it amazingly old (6th c. BC?). One doesn't expect to find swoopy elf-shoe-toes sprouting from the corners of Roman temples, but this indeed came from the temple of Mater Matuta.

The foundations of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. The cool thing about him is he can transform into a truck.

Ephesian Diana, with dozens of boobs, hula dancers, and a tower on her head. Below is her partner in eyebrow-raising, Baby Hercules:

Immediately after this picture was taken, Constantine grabbed my wife and climbed to the top of the Empire State Building.

My complete set of Capitoline Museum photos is up on Flickr, and as I add new sets they will go into my Italy 2009 collection.

(Edit: Muttering to myself, I just summed up the whole trip: "Never have I seen so many things with their own Wikipedia articles!")