The Montemartini Museum

This morning, I got up and hit the Metro first thing to visit the Montemartini Museum. I liked it a lot. It's pretty far from the center of the city (it was a long subway ride), so it's a pretty peaceful place, not mobbed with tourists. It was the best 2,50 € I've ever spent. It's full of ancient sculpture, and interestingly enough, it's a converted 1930's power plant. So here, we have a headless Aesculapius in front of a defunct control panel:

In other areas, they had blueprints of the powerplant, etc. It was kind of an interesting duality, but it worked for me.

Although none of the sculptures and things are as famous as the ones you might find in the Vatican or Capitoline Museums, there were lots of pieces that made me very excited. I was in there for almost two and a half hours. Here are the highlights:

This fresco is from a tomb painting that dates to the 3rd century BC, probably that of a consul who, here, is pictured with his colleague celebrating their victory in the Samnite Wars. It was the most exciting thing in the whole museum to me. The period of the Roman Republic (6th to 1st centuries BC) is my favorite period to study, and this fresco is precious because it's one of the few paintings that survive. It shows up in pretty much every Roman history textbook. You can even barely read some Latin captions (maybe not in this pic, but in real life), mostly just the names of the people depicted.


Mosaics are amazing. They've been popular around the Mediterranean for hundreds of years because they are impervious to the humidity that destroys paintings, frescoes, etc. This particular one is a fragment of a huge picture that depicted all kinds of fish. It was the floor of a bath complex dating from the 2nd century BC. The detail in the fish's scales is breathtaking: some of the tiles are only about 1 mm square. Can you imagine how much time and skill it must have taken to create this?


My favorite type of ancient art is portraiture, especially of families and normal people (as opposed to the emperor--I've seen so many statues of Augustus, it's hard to care after a while). This was one of many Republican-era portraits in the museum, and I particularly enjoyed it because it's a husband and wife who look like they could live next door. It's kind of cool to look at the faces of the ancients and speculate what they might have been like when they were alive.


Haha, Julius Caesar looks kind of evil without his nose, I think. Maybe he just looked evil anyway...who knows.

So anyway, I had a great time, and pretty much had the whole place to myself. :)

I better get going now...it's taken forever for me to upload all these, and I have some homework to do before I go to prayer meeting tonight at RBC. I'll have more later!