Capitoline Wolf

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Capitoline Wolf

unknown, c. 500 BC-480 BC

Bronze, height 75 cm

Rome, Musei Capitolini

Capitoline Wolf (Italian: Lupa Capitolina) is a 5th century BC Etruscan bronze statue, cast in the lower Tiber valley,^[1] located since Antiquity in Rome. Approximately lifesize,^[2] it depicts a she-wolf suckling a pair of human twin infant boys, representing the legendary founders of the city of Rome, Romulus and Remus.

Contents 1 History 2 See also 3 References 4 Further reading 5 Notes 6 External links

[edit] History

In his Naturalis History, Pliny the Elder mentions, near the fig tree in the Roman Forum that was named for the king of Attus Navius, the she-wolf, "a miracle proclaimed in bronze nearby, as though she had crossed the Comitium while Attus Navius was taking the omens." The text is corrupt, but the apparent movement of the lupa suggests that the suckling twins were not then present. The Capitoline Wolf is noted several times by Cicero, once among sacred objects on the Capitoline that had been inauspiciously struck by lightning: "it was a gilt statue on the Capitol of a baby being given suck from the udders of a wolf."^[3] Cicero also mentions the wolf in De Divinatione 1.20 and 2.47.^[4]

Iconic of the city's founding, after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire the Capitoline Wolf was housed until 1471 in San Teodoro^{[citation needed]} and from then to the present inside the Museo Nuovo in the Palazzo dei Conservatori^[5] on the Campidoglio (known in ancient times as Capitoline Hill).

According to the founding myth, the twins' grandfather Numitor was overthrown by his brother Amulius, who ordered them to be cast into the River Tiber. They were rescued by a she-wolf who cared for them until a herdsman, Faustulus, found and raised them. The opinion held by some scholars that the wolf was the very wolf that had been struck by lightning in 65 BCE, mentioned by Cicero, In Capitolio is dismissed by others as too hopeful. In 1925, Jérôme Carcopino made a case that the sculpture was indeed the one mentioned by Cicero, that it had been erected on the Capitol as an emblem of the fusion of Latins and Sabines, nourished by the Sabine totem wolf, and that the origin having been lost with time, the phantom of a Remus had been added to the founder-myth of Romulus, to account for the presence of the twins mentioned by Cicero, subsequently lost.

The Etruscan bronze is dated stylistically to about 500-480 BC. The bronze figures of the twins were added in the late 15th century, perhaps by Antonio del Pollaiuolo, in accordance with the story of Romulus and Remus. However, in 2006 the Italian historian of art Anna Maria Carruba and Etruscologist Adriano La Regina contested this traditional dating, and, on the base of analysis of the casting technique, argued that it could be from the High Middle Ages.^[6]

The bronze wolf was noted at the Lateran Palace from the beginning of the 9th century. In the 10th century Chronicon of Benedict of Soracte, the monk chronicler writes of the institution of a supreme court of justice "in the Lateran palace, in the place called [graffiti], viz, the mother of the Romans." Trials and executions "at the Wolf" are recorded from time to time until 1450.^[7] The twelfth-century English cleric, "Magister Gregorius", wrote a descriptive essay De Mirabilibus Urbis Romae^[8] and recorded in an appendix three pieces of sculpture he had neglected: one was the Wolf in the portico at the principal entrance to the Vatican Palace. He mentions no twins, for he noted that she was set up as if stalking a bronze ram that was nearby and served as a fountain. The wolf too had served as a fountain, Magister Gregorius thought, but it had been broken off at the feet and moved to where he saw it.^[9] In 1450 G. Rucellai saw the lupa pregna (the "pregnant she-wolf") at the Lateran.^[10] She was removed to the Palazzo dei Conservatori on the Campidoglio in 1473, by order of Sixtus IV. She appeared in a woodcut illustration of Mirabilia Urbis Romae (Rome, 1499) already with the infant twins.^[11]

The image was favored by Benito Mussolini who cast himself as the founder of the "New Rome". To encourage American goodwill, he sent several copies of the Capitoline Wolf to American cities. In 1929 he sent one replica for a Sons of Italy national convention in Cincinnati, Ohio. It was switched for another one in 1931, which still stands in Eden Park, Cincinnati. Another replica was given by Mussolini to the city of Rome, Georgia the same year.^[12] A third copy went to New York.

The Capitoline Wolf was used on both the emblem and the poster for the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome. The Roman football club A.S. Roma uses it in its emblem as well.

The programme of conservation undertaken in the 1990s resulted in an exhibition devoted to the Lupa Capitolina and her iconography.

[edit] See also

• Capitoline Wolf statues in cities

[edit] References

• Lombardi, G. "A petrographic study of the casting core of the Lupa Capitolina", Archaeometry 44.4 (November 2002) p 601ff. X-ray diffractometry, thermal analyses, chemistry and thin sections identify the casting site in the lower Tiber valley.

[edit] Further reading

• Carcopino, Jérôme, La louve du capitole (Paris) 1925. This initiated modern research into the sculpture's history.

[edit] Notes

[edit] External links

• (Lacus Curtius website) Rodolfo Lanciani, Ancient Rome in the Light of Recent Discoveries ch. X
• Musei Capitolini website (Italian)
• Lupa Capitolina Elettronica A site devoted to the Capitoline Wolf (in progress)
• Capitoline Museums:Exhibition "The Capitoline She-Wolf", June-October 2000
• New York Times travel guide to Rome: "the Capitoline Wolf, a 6th-century BC Etruscan bronze, holds a place of honor in the museum; the suckling twins were added during the Renaissance to adapt the statue to the legend of Romulus and Remus."
• Rome, Georgia's Capitoline Wolf
• Cincinnati's Capitoline Wolf