The History Blog

Using cutting edge ground-penetrating radar technology, archaeologists from the Ludwig-Boltzmann Institute have discovered extensive remains of a large gladiator school under the Roman legionary city of Carnutum, 24 miles east of Vienna.

The site was first surveyed with ground-penetrating radar in 1996. Evidence of structures was detected, but the technology wasn’t keen enough to give researchers a clear idea of what was under there. This latest and greatest radar was attached to the front of a tractor and relayed real-time three-dimensional images of what was underground.

It’s the first gladiator training school found outside of Italy and it appears to be excellently preserved.

The Vienna institute team has been able to make detailed images of the gladiator school. They reveal that its centre was dominated by a circular arena equipped with wooden benches.

The school houses a heated training hall which combatants would have used during cold central European winters. There are also a bath house, administrative offices and small cell-like rooms for the gladiators themselves.

The school complex spread over 2,800 square meters (3,350 square yards) and was surrounded by a thick wall. Outside the walls was a cemetery. The tombs are elaborate, far more so than in a nearby cemetery from around the same time. The fancy burials could indicate that this was a cemetery set apart for gladiators killed in the games. Gladiators were slaves and were on the social fringes, but success in the arena made them popular heroes, so after their gory deaths gladiators would be buried in style.

Inside the walls there is a courtyard with a small 19-square meter (23-square yard) stadium where the gladiators could practice and put on show fights for visitors and trainers. When it was too cold outside, they would train in the hypocaust heated hall. Don’t be fooled by the heated floors and baths. The gladiators were hardly living in the lap of luxury. Their sleeping cells — because calling them bedrooms would be far too generous — were tiny, just five feet square. There were 40 of these sleeping cubicles in the complex.

The school was right next door to one of two amphitheaters in town. One amphitheater was part of the army garrison and reserved for the legionaries’ blood sport enjoyment; the other, part of the civil town. The school was adjacent to the civil amphitheater, the remains of which are still visible today and are, serendipitously enough, host to a summer gladiator training school.

There are no plans currently to excavate the remains. Only a fraction of the Carnutum site has been excavated so far, and the success of the radar scans will allow archaeologists to make a detailed model of the complex without having to touch spade to soil.

Archaeologists digging on the banks of the River Usk near the Roman fortress of Caerleon in South Wales have uncovered the remains of what is only the second Roman port ever found in Britain. The other is in London, and it was a commercial port that appears to have gone up haphazardly over time as individual merchants built docks for their own needs. The Caerleon port is a single structure, most likely built to supply and move the legions stationed at the fortress.

The Cardiff University team has found in relatively good condition the main quay wall, jetties, landing stages and docking wharves next to a group of several Roman buildings they discovered in a dig last year.

“We are excavating the remains of a previously unknown complex of important Roman buildings that survive remarkably well considering how long they have lain underground.

“The port or harbour is a major addition to the archaeology of Roman Britain and adds a new dimension to our understanding of Caerleon as we can start to think about how the river connected the fortress and Wales to the rest of the Roman Empire.

“We believe that the port dates to period when the Legions were fighting and subduing the native tribes in western Britain and it’s incredible to think that this is the place where the men who took part in the conquest would have arrived.

“Our trenches are also looking at several buildings adjacent to the port and we have also found rooms with under floor heating systems, collapsed walls and roofs, as well as many thousands of objects made, used and lost during the Roman period.

The fortress was built in 74-75 A.D. during the final push under Julius Frontinus to quell the feisty local tribe, the Silures. Claudius’ troops first invaded in 43 A.D., remember, so the Welsh had been giving Rome the pointy end for 30 years by the time the r Legio II Augusta quartered permanently at Caerleon. Historians previously thought that Roman troops had built their own roads then walked them to Wales, but the discovery of the port suggests that the front lines against the Silures were supplied far more promptly and safely by river.

During the four years that Julius Frontinus was governor of Britain (74-78 A.D.), he not only built the fortress of Caerleon and, presumably, its port, but he also established a series of smaller forts 10 or so miles away from each other to house auxiliary troops. This network would have relied on the headquarters for supplies, so all the more use for a functional water route.

In what is probably a coincidence but a cool one, Frontinus is most famous today as the author of De Aquaeductu Urbis Romae, a comprehensive two-volume report of the aqueducts of Rome written when he was appointed Water Commissioner by emperor Nerva in 95 A.D. It’s incredibly nerdy. He lists every aqueduct, its history, size, condition, discharge rates, water quality and source. He mapped the entire water system, set up regular maintenance to prevent leaks and ensure clean and even delivery, and he tracked down and eliminated an enormous number of illegal taps on the lines where local landowners and merchants had connected their own pipes to the main channel to divert water for their selfish needs.

The Guardian has an excellent digital rendering of the port and fortress that it won’t let me embed because it’s mean.

There is a small street in the Campo Marzio neighborhood of Rome’s historic center called Via del Pie’ di Marmo, or Marble Foot Way. It is named after a large marble foot perched on the side of the street that is all that remains of a colossal statue. This one foot is four feet long, so the statue it used to be a part of would have been something like 26 feet high.

Clad in a Greek style of sandal called a Crepida, the foot is thought to have belonged to a colossal statue of the Egyptian goddess Isis whose cult had spread all over the Greco-Roman world after Alexander’s conquest of Egypt. A temple complex dedicated to the imported Egyptian deities Iris and Serapis (the Hellenized version of Osiris) was built in the Campus Martius area in 43 B.C. by order of the second Second Triumvirate, the ruling alliance of Octavian, Marcus Aemilius Lepidus and Mark Antony from 43 to 33 B.C. Augustus would later condemn oriental cults and advocate a return to traditional Roman religion, but worship just went underground until Caligula returned it to prominence.

The Iseum was lavishly decorated with monumental sculptures. At least six obelisks that are now elsewhere in Rome (Piazza Navona, Piazza della Rotonda, Piazza della Minerva and Piazza dei Cinquecento), Florence and Urbino, came from the temple complex. Allegorical statues The River Nile, now in the Vatican’s Chiaramonti Museum, and The Tiber, now in the Louvre museum, were both discovered on the temple grounds in the early 1500s.

The giant foot was found later in the century, along with yellow marble columns and sacrificial altars. It remained pretty much in the spot where it was found until 1878 when it was moved to its current side street so it wouldn’t obstruct the direct path to the Pantheon of Victor Emanuel II’s funeral cortege.

Exposed to filth, pollution and a shoddy restoration that left the poor giant foot with a huge grey plaster gash marring its arch, the sculpture was nonetheless voted one of Rome’s “places of the heart” last year, and is a favorite both of locals and tourists. Last month, as part of an effort to restore some of Rome’s many outdoor sculptures, several of them of the famous talking variety, the Pie’ di Marmo was removed from its eponymous street, thoroughly cleaned and returned. It has a nice new gate around the pedestal and everything.

Excavations in a tunnel under the 2nd century A.D. Baths of Trajan on Rome’s Oppian Hill have unearthed a large wall mosaic depicting Apollo and the muses. The newly discovered stretch of mosaic is 33 feet wide and at least 6 feet high. An earlier excavation in 1998 found the first 20 feet of it, a male figure, apparently a philosopher, and a female figure on either side of a columned architectural structure. Archaeologists suspect the mosaic wall continues even further, perhaps as much as 30 feet down.

The tunnel pre-dates the construction of the baths in 109 A.D., but was built after the nearby Domus Aurea (Nero’s Golden House) which was completed in 64 A.D. That means we can conclusively date the mosaic to some time within that 45 year span. This kind of tunnel was called cryptoporticus, meaning hidden gallery, and was usually a subterranean support for a large building above that had an alternative use as a service corridor. This particular one was used as a powder keg during the Napoleonic occupation of Rome, and in more recent times as a tool shed for park workers.

Such an elaborate and extensive mosaic wouldn’t have been placed in a service tunnel, though, so the space must have had a more social function for the Roman élite, possibly something music related given the Apollo and muses theme.

The discovery was announced by at a press conference on Friday that was part advertising and part pitch for financial support, a common combination is these austerity budget days.

“An archaeological discovery is of extraordinary value to the city of Rome,” said Mayor Gianni Alemanno, thanking the archaeologists for uncovering the treasure of ancient Rome.

He insisted on making it accessible to public and tourists and this would require more funding for the excavations work.

“Now we must make an extra effort to find adequate financial resources to continue the work in the yard and open to the public. I hope, in this sense, the concurrence of all competent authorities to find the necessary resources,” the mayor said.

The necessary resources include an immediate infusion of 200,000 euros ($287,000) to continue the excavation and to make the gallery accessible to the public for guided tours by next October. The next step in the project requires another 480,000 euros ($690,000) to ensure that the entire cryptoportico area is fully explored and stabilized.

Giant mosaics aren’t the only treasures that have been found in the area. In 1997 a fresco of a Roman city, possibly representing an actual city, possibly an ideal one, was discovered. The rare bird’s-eye view fresco was a boon to architectural scholars as well as art historians. Another fresco depicts a vibrant scene of grape stomping. The city of Rome would love to have such a rich vein of Roman art open to tourism.

The word on whether this one was folded over into a burrito as well, but it was discovered just meters away from the 800-pound lead sarcophagus unearthed in 2009.

According to the Gabii Project blog, the human remains inside the 2009 coffin were roughly dated to the 3rd century A.D. According to this most recent article, both the 2009 coffin and its newly discovered double date to the 1st or 2nd century A.D.

Whatever the date, finding just one lead coffin is rare; two is downright uncanny. Lead was extremely expensive and as such not a commonly used burial medium.

According the site director, archaeologist Anna Gallone, the two sarcophagi are examples of a unique local burial custom found in Gabii.

“The massive use of lead in the tombs is unique, it has never been seen before in central Italy,” Gallone told Adnkronos International (AKI).

The same archaeological team discovered both coffins. Directed by Nicola Terrenato of the University of Michigan, the Gabii Project has been ongoing since 2007, starting with an extensive geophysical survey of the 40 hectares of Gabii’s urban center which, along with a magnetometry survey, took the first two years. Those surveys uncovered the urban grid of the city within the old walls. The team used the city grid to figure out where they should be digging. Time well spent, obviously.

Eleven miles east of Rome, the city-state of Gabii was prominent in the first millennium B.C., a rival of early Rome under the kings, but an official ally of the Republic by 493 B.C. It was on the decline in the 1st century B.C., in part thanks to the overquarrying of a valuable stone that was underneath the city, but it was still inhabited and getting infrastructure built during the reign of Hadrian (117–138 A.D.). References to the town disappear from the ancient sources after the 3rd century.

Although there was some later building in the area — a medieval tower was built on the site of Gabii’s acropolis — much of the land was left undeveloped, make Gabii an excellent source of archaeological information about first millennium B.C. life in the Latin states.

On January 13 of this year, the Italian Guardia di Finanza, a police that focuses on financial crimes and smuggling, stopped a truck in Ostia Antica, the ancient port town just south of Rome, and found pieces of an ancient statue of colossal dimension (an estimated 2.5 meters, over 8 feet, high) hidden under rubble. Although the pieces were incomplete, you could identify a larger-than-life togate male figure seated on an elaborately decorated throne with his left foot forward. The foot is wearing a “caliga,” the hobnailed lightweight boot of the Roman legionary.

The looters had broken the statue into smaller, more manageable pieces and were headed to a warehouse nearby. From there the pieces would probably have been smuggled into Switzerland. Two men were arrested and they revealed the excavation place where the statue had been unearthed by looters: the countryside of Lake Nemi, the lake where Emperor Caligula’s gigantic floating palace pleasure barges were found.

The Ministry for Cultural Heritage had the area sealed off and deployed an archaeological team to excavate the exact spot where the looters had discovered the statue. Excavations began on April 11th and immediately returned the vestiges of a large thermal complex, probably a nympheum, a large water monument dedicated to the nymphs. It had a fan-shaped floor plan surrounded by a colonnade that would have been 23 feet high in its day.

At first they thought it might be a mausoleum just because colossal statues like the one discovered there weren’t usually kept in a nymphaea, not even the private ones of the ruling class, but then they found pools with glass mosaic floors, a vast hydraulic system and a lead stamp with the name “Gaius Julius Silanus,” a family of prominence during the 1st century A.D. who had ties to the Julio-Claudian dynasty.

Archaeologists also found over one hundred fragments of the colossal statue. The scepter held in the left hand, drapery on the left shoulder, what might have been a round globe held in the figure’s right hand, pieces of the pedestal, and most excitingly, the head. The back of the head was unsculpted suggesting the statue was meant for a niche in the grotto. The head had been decapitated from the statue in antiquity and defaced. You can barely make out features, certainly not enough to say it’s Caligula for sure, but there’s definitely a diadem, and a where there’s a diadem there’s a deity or deified royalty. The fact that the statue was defaced, decapitated and toppled over in antiquity also supports it being a Caligula effigy. The identification is thoroughly speculative, though, no matter what the headlines say.

The statue has had a preliminary cleaning so it could be displayed at the press conference yesterday. It will remain in Rome for the time being, where it is being restored in the laboratories of the Palazzo Massimo. Once the colossus is ready to move, he will be returned to Nemi for permanently study and display at the Museo delle Navi Romane, the museum built by Mussolini to host Caligula’s ships. There are more pictures in this La Repubblica slideshow, and footage of the statue and excavation from the Guarda di Finanzia below.

The Hypogeum of the Aurelii is a catacomb built for the important Aurelii family during the early third century A.D. It was discovered in November 1919 by construction workers building a body shop (now a large car dealership) on Viale Manzoni, near the Basilica of the Holy Cross in Jerusalem on the Esquiline hill in Rome. The frescoes drew academic attention because of their copious use of both traditional Greco-Roman polytheistic imagery — Hermes, Hercules, Prometheus, Penelope’s suitors — and early Christian iconography — a Latin cross, the Good Shepherd, eleven men in togas (probably apostles), the creation of Adam. Scholars have been speculating ever since about what kind of theology these frescoes were depicting, perhaps a personal syncretistic combination of Christianity and paganism espoused by the Aurelii of this era, perhaps full-on paganism only decorated with some elements of the up-and-coming Christian culture, perhaps a form of dissident Gnosticism with its own unique symbolic imagery.

The arguments underscore what a historically significant find this is, representing as it does the multicultural milieu of a time and place in which a myriad of religions from a variety of Christian sects to Mithraism to paganism all wrestled with and bounced off each other. The Pontifical Commission for Sacred Archeology, the office of the Vatican responsible for the restoration of the hypogeum, presents the artwork as capturing the transition from paganism to Christianity — “the parabola of Christianization,” according to Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, president of the Pontifical Commission — but I think that’s an oversimplification. There weren’t just two strains of temporally overlapping thought here.

The Aurelii were a very prominent and wealthy plebian family in the Roman Republic. They had consuls in the family starting with the First Punic War in the mid-second century B.C. Aurelia Cotta was Gaius Julius Caesar’s mother. In the imperial era, Marcus Aurelius was the most famous of the Aurelii. We don’t know if the builders of the hypogeum were of the imperial line. Manumitted slaves took the gens of their former owners so it could be freedmen, but even so by this time imperial freedmen could be extremely wealthy, politically powerful and socially respected. Enough to be able to afford large and elaborately decorated burial chambers.

The laser technology used during the ten-year restoration to clean the walls (the same technology that was used in the restoration of the catacombs of St. Tecla) has revealed a newly-discovered fresco depicting the death of two brothers, Onesimus Aurelius and Aurelius Papirius, and their sister Aurelia Prima mourning them, all bound with Homeric imagery.

At the top, where the icon painters of the past recognized the palace and the flocks of Laertes, was discovered Aurelia Prima who, in a sign of mourning, lets down her hair to mourn the two dead brothers who have been placed on the bier in a funerary enclosure. In the lower area …, we see the moment when Odysseus gets Circe to return his comrades, transformed into swine [by her sorcery], back into human form. The story, which unfolds in the tenth canto of the Odyssey, fits well with the funerary themes of the period, keeping in mind that it was Circe who showed a curious Odysseus the pathway to the underworld. The new scenes fall perfectly in the multi-religious system headed by the Aurelii’s personal syncretism, which also involves two enigmatic scenes where you can recognize both Prometheus creating man and Hercules in the garden of the Hesperides, and the creation of Adam and the expulsion from Eden.

It is likely that the three named Aurelii were among those buried in the chambers. In an inscribed marble plaque, Aurelius Martinus and his wife Julia Lydia memorialize their deceased daughter Aurelia Myrsina. The frescoes suggest that these Aurelii wanted to present themselves as members of an imperial elite who were entitled to depict themselves along with gods and demigods in the midst of mythological themes. Their villas and gardens, concrete representations of wealth, are the settings of some of these scenes, including the one of Aurelia Prima mourning her brothers.

In order to preserve the delicate frescoes, the hypogeum will not be open to general tourism, but it won’t be closed all the way either. Any would-be tourists will have to book a visit ahead of time with the pontifical commission.

Archaeologists excavating the Vesuvius-blighted town of Herculaneum were thrilled to find a septic tank full of compacted ancient feces. When Vesuvius erupted in 79 A.D., the pyroclastic surge (fluidized volcanic gas and debris) that swept through the city carbonized organic materials in an instant, thus preserving things like wood and food which would otherwise have rotted. Then, once the surges cooled, they hardened, burying the town under 50-60 feet of volcanic rock. The organic materials continued to be protected from the elements for almost 2000 more years.

Herculaneum has thus been a unique source of information about Roman life. Human excrement provides a particularly thorough snapshot of how people lived: what they ate and what sort of illnesses and parasites they were prone to. The city sewers are small, though. One of the main ones that is thought to have served the public baths and several wealthy private homes is a mere 24 inches (60 centimeters) wide and 3.3 feet (1 meter) high. There’s another of similar dimensions running under one of the north-south streets. In order for archaeologists to explore them and to make them usable again for water drainage, those slender sewers were cleared with pressure hoses.

Under a third street, however, they found a far larger tunnel, this one almost 12 feet high (3.6 meters) and 282 feet (86 meter) long. That meant the team could clear that sewer by hand instead of by hose, and archaeologists love nothing more than tunneling through 12 feet of ancient poop. There was over a foot and a half of organic waste deposited along the full 282-foot length of the tunnel. It’s not so much a sewer — it didn’t drain into the sea like the small tunnels did — as a septic tank that collected refuse dropped from garbage chutes connected to the sewer from the apartment buildings, homes and shops on the street above.

The residents would drop all their common household waste, from the contents of commodes to food scraps to broken pottery, down the shaft into the sewer. Archaeologists were immediately able to get an idea of some of the foods eaten by the residents of Herculaneum in the days right before the disaster by looking at the identifiable detritus — like cherry pits and fig seeds — in the top layer of excrement. They eventually collected over 750 bags of excrement from the walls of that septic tank, and have spent the past few years analyzing it.

Close scrutiny of the composted human waste has revealed that the estimated 150 middle- and lower-class inhabitants of the three-storey block of flats had a much more varied diet than previously thought.

They regularly feasted on fish, spiky sea urchins, figs, walnuts, eggs and olives, using the olive pips as fuel in their homes.
Each apartment’s kitchen and latrines was linked to the septic tank via waste disposal chutes, down which households would chuck broken plates, cups and other everyday items. [...]

“What we’ve found is a fantastically good snap shot of what the Romans were using in their kitchens, from pots and pans to glass ware and broken cups,” said Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, the director of the Herculaneum Conservation Project.

They found 170 crates of artifacts including pottery, jewelry and coins, but it’s the poop that’s the greatest treasure of them all, indicating that even the commoners of ancient Herculaneum ate an exceptionally varied diet rich in fiber, seafood, fruit and vegetables.

For an entertaining jaunt through Herculaneum past and present, check out PBS’ Secrets of the Dead: Herculaneum Uncovered. At around the 35 minute mark there are some amazing shots of the organic items that survived, like a beautifully inlaid wooden bed and a loaf of bread that looks like you could dust it off and eat it right now, followed by a glimpse into the sewer that has provided archaeologists with so much lovely crap to sift through.

A 2000-year-old Roman shipwreck discovered off the coast of Grado, Italy in 1986 has an interesting feature: a 51-inch-long lead pipe that fits into a hole 2.7 inches in diameter drilled into the hull near the keel. Since shipwrights are not usually in the habit of poking holes into the bottom of what should be a watertight vessel, researchers at the Museum of Underwater Archaeology in Grado (where the wreck has been studied since it was recovered in 1999) have been investigating the possible uses of the hole and pipe. Last month they published a theoretical reconstruction in the International Journal of Nautical Archaeology suggesting the hole and pipe were part of a hydraulic system that would have kept oxygenated water pumping through a large aquarium, allowing the small trading vessel to carry an impressively large load of live fish.

The ship is only 55 feet long and 19 feet wide, and 600 amphorae were found on board filled with preserved fish and fish products like the ubiquitous garum, an umami-rich fish sauce that the Romans used in pretty much every dish imaginable, including desserts. Since they had no means to refrigerate fresh fish for long haul transportation, historians have thought that people ate fish within easy reach of where they were caught. Ancient sources, however, do claim that live fish were transported over long distances. Pliny, for example, in Book 9 of his Natural History describes the Emperor Claudius’s fleet commander collecting live parrotfish (scarus in Latin, a great delicacy considered superior to other fish because it supposedly ruminated on grasses instead of eating other fish) from the Black Sea and bringing them back to the Mediterranean to release them into the wild and create a local population. Pliny says it worked, too.

Carlo Beltrame, a marine archaeologist at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice in Italy, and his colleagues believe the lead pipe was connected to a hand-operated piston pump that, through a series of one-way valves, pulled water from the ocean into a live fish tank. The research team calculated that the pump could have supported a flow of 66 gallons (252 liters) of water per minute. There was space behind that ship’s mast and sufficient structural capability to support an aquarium measuring 11.4 feet by 6.5 feet by 3.3 feet holding 140 cubic feet of water. A tank that size would need to have its water refreshed every half hour to ensure the survival of the fish. The piston pump would have been able to completely replace the water every 16 minutes, so the pumpers would have plenty of time to spare. A tank that size could have comfortably carried 440 pounds of live fish.

No pump mechanism was found on the wreck, however, and the pipe was discovered nestled in a sort of small bilge-well. Why not assume the pipe would have been part of a bilge pump rather than the far more elaborate tank theory? The researchers think it’s unlikely that a ship of this size would have a complex mechanism like a bilge pump just to discharge water. Roman ships had simple bucket chain pump systems that were able to dump water out of the side of the ship easily and safely. If they were going to use a bilge pump system, they’d have to have a damn good reason: i.e., profit.

Even if we accept for the sake of argument that there was a piston pump on board, how do we know it was there to feed a live fish tank? Such pumps have been used even up until the 19th century to clean decks and extinguish fires as well. The research team doesn’t think that’s a likely use in this case simply because the ship was too small and innocuous to require so elaborate a system for cleaning or in case of fire. That’s more the kind of thing you’d find on a warship.

According to Rita Auriemma, a marine archaeologist at the University of Salento, it is plausible that the hydraulic system in Grado ship served for live fish trade.

“The context in which the ship operated makes this the most logical explanation,” Auriemma told Discovery News.

“The near Istria coast was known for numerous vivaria, large enclosures to breed fish. It is possible that the Grado ship transported live fish from these vivaria to large markets in the high Adriatic,” Auriemma said.

Indeed, it would have taken about 10 hours to cross the nearly 30 miles of sea that divided the Istria vivaria to the river port of Aquileia, one of the richest Roman towns during the imperial period.

“Such a trip could have been sustained by the live fish only through an apparatus of continuous water exchange similar to that of the Grado ship,” Beltrame said.

Still, there isn’t a great deal of hard archaeological evidence supporting this theory. The research team’s next step is to attempt to recreate the pump and tank system to see if it would have worked in practice. If it turns out to be true that a small workhorse like the Grado ship routinely carried live fish, this will revolutionize historians’ understanding of Roman trade.

The Capitoline Venus, a larger than life-sized Roman nude of a Venere Pudica, or modest Venus after her pose that graciously covers her lady bits, will go on display at Washington, D.C.’s National Gallery of Art starting this coming Saturday through early September.

Gallery Director Earl A. Powell III called it a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” to see the piece in the United States. It will have a prime spot as a museum centerpiece for the busy summer months.

“The ‘Venus’ will feel right at home in our West Building Rotunda, which was designed by John Russell Pope and was based on the Pantheon in Rome,” Powell said in a written statement. [...]

The exhibit is part of an effort by Rome Mayor Gianni Alemanno to display masterpieces in the United States between 2011 and 2013. It also marks the 150th anniversary of Italy’s unification as a single state.

This is the first time the Venus has ever been loaned since it was discovered under the gardens of the Stazi family estate on the Viminal Hill in the 1670s. In 1752 Pope Benedict XIV bought it from the Stazi and donated it to Rome’s Capitoline Museum. Forty-five years later, Napoleon invaded Italy. Under the terms of 1797′s Treaty of Tolentino, French officials were allowed to confiscate any work of art they wanted no matter who owned it. All they had to do was walk in and claim it. The Capitoline Venus was one of the confiscated works. The Venus went to the Louvre, leaving Rome for the first time against her will.

After Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, the Treaty of Vienna guaranteed the return of confiscated Italian and German art so the Venus made her way back to Rome in 1816. Since then, it has remained safely ensconced in its own niche in the Palazzo Nuovo on the Capitoline hill.

The Capitoline Venus is one of the best preserved statues from antiquity ever discovered. She was found almost entirely intact, missing only her nose, a few fingers and a hand that was later reattached. She’s a Roman copy of a 3rd or 2nd century statue, now lost, that was itself a derivative of Praxiteles’ revolutionary Aphrodite of Cnidus, the first life-sized female nude.

The Cnidian Aphrodite had only one hand obscuring her mons and it’s casually posed as if captured mid-gesture. The Capitoline Venus affects that pose but then also drapes her other arm over her breasts. It does quite a poor job of obscuring them, of course, but it’s a more protective overall posture. The Cnidus Aphrodite is more comfortable with her nudity. Although Praxiteles’ original is lost, the Colonna Venus, now in the Vatican Museums, is widely considered the most accurate extant copy. Here she is, for comparison’s sake: