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.

    391/430 (page 345)
    cannot be easily given. The fact that the majority of statues imported from Greece were cast in bronze may explain their disappearance to a certain extent, because metal excited the greed of the barbarians more than any other spoils of war. From a description of Rome written a. d. 546, by Zacliarias, a Byzantine historian, Bishop of Mytilene in the island of Lesbos, we gather that, to¬ wards the middle of the sixth century of our era, there were still left standing in public places 3890 works of art in bronze — one third as many as were still kept, at that time, in private palaces, gardens, and villas. Of this immense collection only eleven specimens have come down to us. But there were marble originals as well, which the barbarians despised and left uninjured. It has been said that they must have perished in mediaeval lime-kilns. No doubt they did, and by the thousand; but why should mediaeval lime-burners take special pleasure in destroying originals in preference to Roman copies ? This is the problem the solution of which has yet to be found. Here let me state one fact which redeems to a certain extent the memory of Nero, the lover of Antium: the fact is that, whenever excavations have been made in grounds known to have belonged to him, some genuine work of a Greek master has been sure to come to light; in other words, the only chance we have left of discov¬ ering lost masterpieces is to follow in the footsteps of Nero, and search every building or site that is known to have been inhabited by him, whether the Golden House at Rome, or the hunting-box at Sublaqueum, or the sea palace at Antium. Nero seems to have been possessed of a double nature, one half of which was kind, generous, poetic, artistic, musical, while the other was utterly depraved. Nothing