Wanderings in the Roman Campagna / by Rodolfo Lanciani.

  • Rodolfo Lanciani
Date:
1909
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Wanderings in the Roman Campagna / by Rodolfo Lanciani. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    367/430 (page 321)
    lying in pieces near its own pedestal at the foot of the side garden stairs. When I arrived on the spot about the hour of noon, all hope of recovering the missing head had already been given up. Detached from the body at the moment of its fall, it must have shared the fate of so many other heads, which were rounded into the shape of balls to be used in the game of boccie, or else used as weights for scales, with the help of iron rings fixed in the top. As a rule seventy-five statues in a hundred are found headless, and likewise seventy-five heads are found without bodies. The statue unearthed on April 24 is a copy, and a very excellent one, of the Disk-thrower of Myron, a subject in great favor with the Romans. Three other repiicas were already known. The first is the celebrated “ Discobolo Lancellotti,” discovered in the Lamian gar¬ dens on the Esquiline by the Marchesa Barbara Massimi di Palombara on January 14, 1781, and now preserved in the Lancellotti palace under lock and key, so that no student has been able to examine it. Such an idiosyn¬ crasy is the more surprising when we remember that kindness and generosity to others has always been characteristic of the Roman aristocracy. The second replica, now in the Sala della Biga, n. 618, was found by Count Giuseppe Fede in 1791 near the so-called Nymphseum of Hadrian’s villa, stolen by Napoleon, and brought back to Rome after the peace of 1815. The third, a torso, belonged to the French sculptor, Etienne Monnot, in whose studio it was transformed into a Dying Warrior and then sold to the Capitoline Maiseum. Helbig considers Monnot’s torso the most admirable of all and the one which comes nearest to the perfection of Myron’s original. Ill luck seems to have followed these Discoboli; they all have met with unfair treatment. In