Dusty Art

My prior Art posts can be found HERE.

How do we move away from being a civilization that produces art that causes comments like, “my five year old could make this,” back to being one that creates beauty and inspires deep questions? We must reject modernity and embrace tradition. To embrace tradition, we must first learn about it.

Let’s study art history together.

Equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius

Medium	Bronze, originally gilded
Location	Capitoline Museums

It is exceedingly difficult to find a man who is the subject (along with his horse) of an equestrian statue, who is not a great and important figure in history. That’s really how you know you made it. And of course I say great in the sense of the size and impact a person had with his or her life. Size and impact are morally neutral. As we all know, one can be…

It is a thing then to be appreciated when the subject who is “great” is also largely viewed as good, too. That’s the case with the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius. History tells us that that philosopher emperor of Rome was (for the most part) a good figure. It remains trendy two millennia after his life to study his writings on stoicism. Perhaps this high view of his character is why his statue survived across time while so many of his fellow pre-Christian emperors saw their statues destroyed.

The Romans in his own era knew that he had been an Emperor worth remembering, even during his own life (which is why he was the subject of this statue five years before he died.) Did he commission it for himself? Probably. But the statue stands today. It looks incredible and has been protected and preserved across time, even as governments, politics, and religious practices have changed.

Perhaps in relation to its feeling of timelessness, there is a myth around the statue that it will turn gold again (it started out gold covered) on the Day of Judgment.

(more via wiki)

The Equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius (Italian: statua equestre di Marco Aurelio; Latin: Equus Marci Aurelii) is an ancient Roman equestrian statue on the Capitoline Hill, Rome, Italy. It is made of bronze and stands 4.24 m (13.9 ft) tall. Although the emperor is mounted, the sculpture otherwise exhibits many similarities to the standing statues of Augustus. The original is on display in the Capitoline Museums, while the sculpture now standing in the open air at the Piazza del Campidoglio is a replica made in 1981 when the original was taken down for restoration.

Description

The statue projects an impression of power and god-like grandeur: the emperor is over life-size and extends his hand in a gesture of adlocutio used by emperors when addressing their troops. Some historians assert that a conquered enemy was originally part of the sculpture (based on medieval accounts, including in the Mirabilia Urbis Romae, which suggest that a small figure of a bound barbarian chieftain once cowered underneath the horse’s front right leg). Such an image was meant to portray the emperor as victorious and all-conquering. However, shown without weapons or armour, Marcus Aurelius seems to be a bringer of peace rather than a military hero, for this is how he saw himself and his reign.

The emperor is shown riding without the use of stirrups, which had not yet been introduced to the West. While the horse has been meticulously studied in order to be recreated for other artists’ works, the saddle cloth was copied with the thought that it was part of the standard Roman uniform. The saddle cloth is actually Sarmatian in origin, suggesting that the horse is a Sarmatian horse and that the statue was created to honour the victory over the Sarmatians by Marcus Aurelius, after which he adopted “Sarmaticus” to his name.

History

The statue was erected around 175 AD. Its original location is debated: the Roman Forum and Piazza Colonna (where the Column of Marcus Aurelius stands) have been proposed. However, it was noted that the site where it had originally stood had been converted into a vineyard during the early Middle Ages.

Although there were many equestrian imperial statues, they rarely survived because it was the common practice to melt down bronze statues for reuse as material for coins or new sculptures in the late empire. Indeed, that of Marcus Aurelius is one of only two surviving bronze statues of a pre-Christian Roman emperor; the Regisole, destroyed after the French Revolution, may have been another. The equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius in Rome owes its preservation to the Campidoglio to a common misidentification of Marcus Aurelius, the philosopher-emperor, with Constantine the Great, the Christian emperor; indeed, more than 20 other bronze equestrian statues of various emperors and generals had been melted down since the end of the Imperial Roman era.

It has been speculated that its misidentification stems from the prior existence of an equestrian statue of Constantine which had stood beside the Arch of Septimius Severus, and which had been most likely taken on the orders of the emperor Constans II during his visit to Rome in 663. With its removal, the people eventually mistakenly identified Marcus Aurelius’s statue as Constantine’s.

In the Middle Ages this was one of the few Roman statues to remain on public view, in the Campus Lateranensis, to the east of the Lateran Palace in Rome, from 1474 on a pedestal provided by Pope Sixtus IV. Its placement next to the Lateran Palace was due to the fact that this site used to contain the house of Marcus Aurelius’s grandfather Marcus Annius Verus, which was where the emperor’s birth and early education took place. According to the Liber Pontificalis, an unpopular prefect of the city under Pope John XII (d. 964) was hung from it by the hair by the mob.

By order of Pope Paul III, it was moved to the Piazza del Campidoglio (Capitoline Hill) during Michelangelo‘s redesign of the hill in 1538, to remove it from the main traffic of the square. Though Michelangelo disagreed with the central positioning, he designed a pedestal for it. The original bronze statue is now in the Palazzo dei Conservatori of the Musei Capitolini; that in the square is a modern replica.

On the night of 29 November 1849, at the inception of the revolutionary Roman Republic, a mass procession set up the red–white–green tricolore (now the flag of Italy, then a new and highly “subversive” flag) in the hands of the mounted Marcus Aurelius.

In 1979, a bomb attack in the nearby Palazzo Senatorio damaged the marble base of the statue.

Cultural significance

Aureus of Marcus Aurelius (AD December 173 – June 174) and Italian €0.50 coin (2002)

The statue appears on the reverse of an aureus of Marcus Aurelius struck in 174 AD. It is depicted on the reverse of the modern Italian €0.50 coin, designed by Roberto Mauri [it].

The statue was formerly clad in gold. An old local myth says that it will turn gold again on the Day of Judgment.

Replicas

In 1981 work began on producing a replica of the statue for outdoor display. Digital image files were used for reference while a laser beam ensured accurate measurements. Conservators used this copy to cast a faithful bronze replica of the statue, now in the Campidoglio.

For a great video on the statue, please let me direct you to the following: