A precious selection of over 660 polychrome marbles of the imperial age from the Capitoline collection and the Dino and Ernesta Santarelli Foundation will be hosted from 12 April in two rooms of Palazzo Clementino at the Capitoline Museums, next to the medal table. Thanks to a free ten-year loan, the exhibition offers a vision of the immense quantity of stones imported to Rome: a unique opportunity to retrace, through shapes, colors and patterns, the millenary history of the capital from an artistic point of view but also sociocultural, political and economic. The use of polychrome marbles in fact characterized in a decisive way the Roman architecture of the imperial age.
The setting I Colori dell’Antico. Marmi Santarelli at the Capitoline Museums is promoted by Roma Culture, the Capitoline Superintendence for Cultural Heritage and the Santarelli Foundation. Curated by Vittoria Bonifati. Scientific curator Andrea G. De Marchi. Cookies installation project (Alice Grégoire, Clément Périssé, Federico Martelli). Museum services of Zètema Progetto Cultura. Catalog published by Treccani.
The exhibition is developed in two rooms. The first exhibits 82 polychrome fragments from the Santarelli Foundation; the other houses two pairs of samples, one from the early 19th century with 422 pieces, also from the Foundation, the other pertaining to the Capitoline collection, begun in the second half of the 19th century by the Gui family and made up of 288 tiles. In the same room there is also a head of Dionysus mounted on an irrelevant female bust (made up of eight different types of marble and a selection of tools for working marble from the Fiorentini workshop). In loop, a documentary is screened, curated by Adriano Aymonino and Silvia Davoli, which traces the history of these subjects that reached Rome in relation to the expansion policy of the empire.
The exhibition aims to tell the close connection between the presence of non-native materials in the city of Rome and the political, economic and geographical expansion of the ancient Roman Empire, tracing territories and geographical networks through history and memory. In fact, since the great roads of the empire start from the center of the ancient city, the location of the marbles reflects the cardinals from which they came to Rome. The result is an instructive glance, which indicates the civilizations most accustomed to working with marble at the time of the Roman conquest. The use of some colored marbles dates back to the Neolithic or the late Bronze Age, such as the hard green serpentine. In Egypt the pharaohs exploited different qualities and their last dynasty, the Ptolemies (305 – 30 BC), expanded the repertoire with porphyry and alabaster, which will later be appreciated in Rome. Here the rejection of luxury prevailed for a long time, preferring ideas and materials drawn from tradition.
The introduction of some colored marbles dates back to the Republican period, such as the ancient yellow and the pavonazzetto, while their diffusion is to be connected to the emperor Augustus. The largest assortment of colored marbles dates back to the Flavians (69-96 AD). Many quarries became imperial with the Antonines, who increased the extra Italic ones. The colors were enlivened by smoothings, greases or waxes and must have been related to paintings and decorations, almost all of which have been lost. Extraction, processing and transport required a large number of employees, who had to be well trained and disciplined. It is possible that Augustus and his successors deliberately wanted to finance these activities also to favor the ethnic and social amalgamation within the enormous extension of the empire, wanting to involve the conquered peoples economically. The costs were comparable to those of military campaigns and must have had adequate reasons. But the reason is not entirely clear. It has been interpreted as a desire for luxury, for increased tax revenues and a symbolic representation of imperial extension.
The progressive military, political, administrative and economic dissolution of the West, which corresponds to the Early Middle Ages, saw most of the quarries closed and subsequently the strong tendency to reuse ancient materials. A new art was developing, which would have exploited colored marbles in an original way. Floors with slabs reused whole or chopped, to form geometric patterns, spread. The tints of some ancient marble echoed in the Romanesque and Gothic architecture, in Tuscany and in other regions, facades and bell towers streaked with white and red (or green), imitating porphyry and serpentine, as did the fourteenth-century painting more exactly. . In the most organic revival of the ancient, the Renaissance, a contradictory and neglected fact is noted: the vivid colors of Rome were faded or reinvented. A change is due to Raphael’s maturity, in the Vatican Rooms, starting with that of the Fire (1514-1517), where various colored stones are appropriately painted. In the mid-sixteenth century the marble inlay developed in Florence (from 1588 with the Opificio delle Pietre Dure), which seems to be reflected in the style of Bronzino. Then the paintings on slate and then on other stone qualities also spread. The vivid colors of Rome soon triggered a commonplace: they would have been excessive, corrupting the measured Greek simplicity. It is an idea that re-emerges in the history of art, in the judgments on Mannerism and Baroque as degenerations of the Renaissance equilibrium.
In the early Renaissance, those colors must have been seen better than now, especially in the marbles, which had not undergone centuries of stripping, nor the action of pollution. Yet many images of the city show them faded, up to Neoclassicism and beyond. It may be that that “filter” was used to make the images referring to the past credible, since something similar is seen in the cinematic flashback, often in black and white or with altered colors. Such modifications may have helped to use the artistic image as a time machine.