| Equestrian Statue of Marcus Aurelius | |
|---|---|
 The original | |
 Click on the map for a fullscreen view | |
| Medium | Bronze, originally gilded |
| Location | Capitoline Museums |
| 41°53′34″N 12°28′56″E / 41.89274164°N 12.48224146°E | |
The Equestrian Statue of Marcus Aurelius (Italian: statua equestre di Marco Aurelio; Latin: Equus Marci Aurelii) is an ancient Roman equestrian statue on the Capitoline Hill, Rome, Italy. It is made of bronze and stands 4.24 m (13.9 ft) tall. Although the emperor is mounted, the sculpture otherwise exhibits many similarities to the standing statues of Augustus. The original is on display in the Capitoline Museums, while the sculpture now standing in the open air at the Piazza del Campidoglio is a replica made in 1981 when the original was taken down for restoration.
YouTube Encyclopedic
-
1/5Views:80 1611 3865784318 278
-
Equestrian Sculpture of Marcus Aurelius
-
MARCUS AURELIUS BRONZE EQUESTRIAN SCULPTURE: The Ultimate Imperial Portrait…
-
Roman Apartments and Equestrian Statue of Marcus Aurelius
-
EQUESTRIAN STATUE OF MARCUS AURELIUS - ITALY, ROME
-
Marcus Aurelius: Biography [Overview]
Transcription
SPEAKER 1: We're in the Capitoline Museums in Rome, looking at the equestrian sculpture of the emperor Marcus Aurelius. We're not exactly sure of the date, but it's sometime around 176 or 180 CE. SPEAKER 2: It's in a new space, because it was suffering some conservation problems and so had to be removed from the Campidoglio, where Michelangelo had put it. SPEAKER 1: And actually, that's an important point, because we don't know where it originally was in Rome. SPEAKER 2: No. What's really important is that this is the only equestrian sculpture of this size to survive from antiquity. SPEAKER 1: And we know that there had been dozens of them in Rome. SPEAKER 2: They were created to celebrate the triumphal return of an emperor. SPEAKER 1: There's so much authority as a result of him on horseback, clearly ruling. His left arm is lightly holding the reins-- or would have been lightly holding the reins of the horse. The right hand protrudes out. SPEAKER 2: Addressing the troops, or addressing the citizens of Rome. SPEAKER 1: There's a sense of confidence in his posture and, of course, in the scale. SPEAKER 2: It is enormous. This survived because it was thought to have represented Constantine, the emperor who made Christianity legal in the Roman Empire. And so this wasn't melted down for its bronze the way that almost all other equestrian sculptures were. SPEAKER 1: This could have ended up as a cannon. That's right. SPEAKER 2: So we're lucky it survived. And it had an enormous influence in the Renaissance for artists, beginning with Donatello and Leonardo da Vinci. And of course, also the ability to cast something this size in bronze had also been lost. SPEAKER 1: And it just shows how accomplished the ancient Romans were, both in their handling of the material, but also in the representation, the real understanding of the body, of its musculature. SPEAKER 2: And of the anatomy of the horse, striding forward. It's so animated and lifelike. SPEAKER 1: The folds of the neck as his head pushes downward. SPEAKER 2: And the folds of the drapery that Marcus Aurelius is wearing, how it comes down and drapes over his leg and the back of the horse. SPEAKER 1: There's also something really wonderfully momentary and also, at the same time, I think, very timeless here. The horse is striding, his arm is raised, but there's a wonderful sense of balance. The horse is in motion. He's pulling to the right. SPEAKER 2: He had in his left hand the reins, so there's a tension in that he sort of seems to be pulling back. And the horse pulls its head back a little bit. At the same time, the right side of his body seems to be moving forward. SPEAKER 1: And leaning to the right. SPEAKER 2: There's a kind of animation throughout. SPEAKER 1: There's also this unity between this incredibly powerful animal and Marcus Aurelius. He's in full control of the horse. And I think that that's the point. SPEAKER 2: And even kind of moving forward while pulling the horse back slightly. SPEAKER 1: With his body. SPEAKER 2: Like he's holding it back. SPEAKER 1: And you're right, his left hand is holding the reins, but it's a light touch even though he's in command of this incredibly powerful animal. SPEAKER 2: Is it me or does he seem a little too big for the horse? Do you know if this was cast in one piece? SPEAKER 1: It would have been cast in individual pieces. And then it would have been assembled. And then the bronze would have been worked so as to erase the seams. SPEAKER 2: And so this commemorating of a great man and his great deeds was an important idea in the Renaissance with the flowering of humanism, this recognition of the achievement of an individual, the representation of that individual in a portrait. These were things that had been lost in the Middle Ages. SPEAKER 1: This interest in representation, both of his authority, of his position in society, but also the ability to render the body, and then the interest in rendering. All of those things come together in the Renaissance again, having originally come together, of course, in the classical world.
Description
The statue projects an impression of power and god-like grandeur: the emperor is over life-size and extends his hand in a gesture of adlocutio used by emperors when addressing their troops. Some historians assert that a conquered enemy was originally part of the sculpture (based on medieval accounts, including in the Mirabilia Urbis Romae, which suggest that a small figure of a bound barbarian chieftain once cowered underneath the horse's front right leg).[1] Such an image was meant to portray the emperor as victorious and all-conquering. However, shown without weapons or armour, Marcus Aurelius seems to be a bringer of peace rather than a military hero, for this is how he saw himself and his reign.
The emperor is shown riding without the use of stirrups, which had not yet been introduced to the West. While the horse has been meticulously studied in order to be recreated for other artists' works, the saddle cloth was copied with the thought that it was part of the standard Roman uniform. The saddle cloth is actually Sarmatian in origin, suggesting that the horse is a Sarmatian horse and that the statue was created to honour the victory over the Sarmatians by Marcus Aurelius, after which he adopted "Sarmaticus" to his name.[2]
History
The statue was erected around 175 AD. Its original location is debated: the Roman Forum and Piazza Colonna (where the Column of Marcus Aurelius stands) have been proposed.[1] However, it was noted that the site where it had originally stood had been converted into a vineyard during the early Middle Ages.[3]
Although there were many equestrian imperial statues, they rarely survived because it was the common practice to melt down bronze statues for reuse as material for coins or new sculptures in the late empire. Indeed, that of Marcus Aurelius is one of only two surviving bronze statues of a pre-Christian Roman emperor; the Regisole, destroyed after the French Revolution, may have been another. The equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius in Rome owes its preservation on the Campidoglio to the popular mis-identification of Marcus Aurelius, the philosopher-emperor, with Constantine the Great, the Christian emperor; indeed, more than 20 other bronze equestrian statues of various emperors and generals had been melted down since the end of the Imperial Roman era.[4][5] It has been speculated that its misidentification stems from the prior existence of an equestrian statue of Constantine which had stood beside the Arch of Septimius Severus, and which had been most likely taken on the orders of the emperor Constans II during his visit to Rome in 663. With its removal, the people eventually mistakenly identified Marcus Aurelius's statue for Constantine's.[6]
In the Middle Ages this was one of the few Roman statues to remain on public view. In the 8th century it stood in the Campus Lateranensis, to the east of the Lateran Palace in Rome, sitting on a pedestal that was later provided by Pope Sixtus IV.[7] Its placement next to the Lateran Palace was due the fact that this site used to contain the house of Marcus Aurelius's grandfather Marcus Annius Verus, which was where the emperor's birth and early education took place.[3] By order of Pope Paul III, it was moved to the Piazza del Campidoglio (Capitoline Hill) during Michelangelo's redesign of the hill in 1538, to remove it from the main traffic of the square.[7] Though Michelangelo disagreed with the central positioning, he designed a pedestal for it.[1] The original bronze statue is in the Palazzo dei Conservatori of the Musei Capitolini; that in the square is a modern replica.
On the night of 29 November 1849, at the inception of the revolutionary Roman Republic, a mass procession set up the red–white–green tricolore (now the flag of Italy, then a new and highly "subversive" flag) in the hands of the mounted Marcus Aurelius.[8]
In 1979, a bomb attack in the nearby Palazzo Senatorio damaged the marble base of the statue.
Cultural significance
The statue appears on the reverse of an aureus of Marcus Aurelius struck in 174 AD. It is depicted on the reverse of the modern Italian €0.50 coin, designed by Roberto Mauri.
The statue was formerly clad in gold. An old local myth says that it will turn gold again on the Day of Judgment.[9][10]
Replicas
In 1981 work began on producing a replica of the statue for outdoor display. Digital image files were used for reference while a laser beam ensured accurate measurements. Conservators used this copy to cast a faithful bronze replica of the statue, now in the Campidoglio.[11]
References
- ^ a b c Stewart, Peter, "The Equestrian Statue of Marcus Aurelius" in A Companion to Marcus Aurelius, edited by Martin van Ackeren, Wiley-Blackwell, 2012, pp. 264–77.
- ^ Nickel, Helmut (1989). "The Emperor's New Saddle Cloth: The Ephippium of the Equestrian Statue of Marcus Aurelius". Metropolitan Museum Journal. 24: 17–24. doi:10.2307/1512863. JSTOR 1512863. S2CID 192180871.
- ^ a b Gregorovius, Ferdinand, History of the City of Rome in the Middle Ages, Vol. 2, (1894) p. 161
- ^ Equestrian Statue of Marcus Aurelius in the Capitoline Museum, Rome
- ^ Equestrian Statue of Marcus Aurelius Capitoline Museum
- ^ Gregorovius, p. 161
- ^ a b Fehl, Philipp (1974). "The Placement of the Equestrian Statue of Marcus Aurelius in the Middle Ages". Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes. 37: 362–367. doi:10.2307/750854. JSTOR 750854. S2CID 192301344.
- ^ Leona Rostenberg, "Margaret Fuller's Roman Diary" The Journal of Modern History 12.2 (June 1940:209–220) p. 212
- ^ This folk legend is recorded in p. 40 of the National Geographic Traveler's Rome (2006)
- ^ Palazzo Braschi (1963). Giuseppe Gioachino Belli e la Roma del suo tempo: mostra del centenario della morte del poeta (1863–1963). Palazzo Braschi, dicembre 1963 – febbraio 1964. De Luca.
- ^ Friedland, Elise A.; Sobocinski, Melanie Grunow; Gazda, Elaine K. (2015). The Oxford Handbook of Roman Sculpture. Oxford University Press. p. 272. ISBN 978-0-19-992182-9.
External links
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
This page was last edited on 24 February 2024, at 20:24