Palazzo Massimo and Palazzo Altemps

Now given my love of Classical statues and mosaics, this was one of the highlights of my stay in Rome. Its just a wonderful collection, sedately presented, ie not overcrowded. Go, but in the meantime, see here.

An interesting combination here, a craggy ageing general's face on a young man's body. An exercise in vanity.

Now most of the best statues are frankly of  hunky blokes. One exception here though, a daughter of Niobe (regrettably being shot by an arrow in the back). You have to say she is hot.

A nice dour bust of an old woman. You wouldn't want to mess with her.

Now for a real rarity, a room with two bronze statues. Once this would have been the norm, but almost all the ancient bronzes were melted down. Indeed most of the marble statues were merely copies of bronze ones.  Only a few bronzes survive and this room contains two - a prince holding a spear

and an old pugilist. The brilliance of these statues is hard to convey, but to give you an idea of the trouble taken over these creations, even the lips and scar tissue on his face, and his nipples, are cast of slightly different alloys of bronze to produce subtly different shades of colour.

 Just look at the detail and depth of carving on this sarcophagus. The face of the helmeted figure below left is not missing through damage. It was just that the person it was meant to represent hadn't died yet, and it was never quite finished off.

Sleeping hermaphrodite. Wouldn't you just like to give those buttocks a quick slap?

Now this is rather special.  An even rarer survival than the bronzes. This beautiful, graceful face is in ivory

And in Olympic year (well just into the year after Olympic year if you want to be pedantic) the Discoboulos, one of the most famous images of the ancient world. Just an incredibly fine image. And apart from the obvious comment on how fine the sculptor has managed to chisel the athlete's muscles (finely-chiseled features indeed), the other incredible thing is the way the discus is suspended without support from below. Its marble, and so heavy, and so that must be just at the point where the stone arm shouldn't be able to bear the weight and it cracks and falls off. That would be very annoying.

 

 But finally, while many museums have statues, this one has a collection of mosaics and in particular wall-paintings. 2000 years old interior design.

Some pretty explicit wallpaper!

This is perhaps the most amazing survival - almost complete frescoes from the House of Livia - a garden painted on a wall.

Now along with the Palazzo Massimo and the Baths of Diocletian, there is a third edifice which is part of the Museo Nazionale Romana, the Palazzo Altemps. I decided to do all three the same day, so in the early evening headed off to this old Palace, now finely restored. Primarily this contains the Ludovisi Collection, a group of mainly statues collected by a seventeenth century cardinal.

I feel this point is a good one to give my views on restoration. The current vogue is for honesty, ie clean things up but leave them as they are.  However, I quite like restorations, or even reconstructions, to show us what something would have been like when new. Go on, help us imagine; make it easy for us.

Back in the seventeenth century restoration was totally in fashion. So this collection may look better preserved than many of the others in Rome, but that is to a large extent because missing bits were simply filled in. Now as I say, I have some sympathy for this, but this collection takes things too far. The information signs near the exhibits show what is original and in some cases its not all that much. But worse still, its not a matter of just putting in a sympathetically carved missing arm (and so many of these statues are copies that there is probably another version somewhere which may indicate what the missing bit was supposed to be) but many are marriages of more than one statue, a head from one stuck on a body from another. Not that this particularly detracted from my enjoyment of this place - just that I prefer a little more authenticity.

It was a lovely evening, and it was Epiphany, and everyone was out late. The Palazzo is just off Piazza Navona which was full of stalls and just very jolly.