Capitoline Museums

• 1. Introduction

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  In 1471, Pope Sixtus IV did something remarkable: he gave away some of Rome's most prized ancient bronzes. Not to a king or a cardinal, but to the Roman people. The Capitoline Museums trace their founding to that single act of donation, making them among the oldest public museum collections on earth. They sit atop the Capitoline Hill, the smallest of Rome's seven hills and, for centuries, its most politically charged. The buildings that house them, arrayed around Piazza del Campidoglio, follow a design by Michelangelo. Their rooms hold the Dying Gaul, the Capitoline Wolf, the Equestrian Statue of Marcus Aurelius, and a Caravaggio painted when the artist was barely in his twenties. But the story of how all of this came to exist on one hilltop stretches across five hundred years of donations, papal rivalries, Napoleonic theft, and a single treaty signing that changed the course of European history.

• 2. A Hilltop and Its Bronzes

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  Sixtus IV framed his 1471 gift not as generosity but as an act of restitution. An inscription preserved in the Palazzo dei Conservatori records that the bronzes, held in the Lateran Palace through the Middle Ages, were being "returned and donated without reservations" to the Roman people who had originally made them. The items handed over included the Capitoline Wolf, the Camillus statue, the Boy with Thorn, and two fragments of a colossal statue of Domitian. The Wolf was placed on the facade of the Palazzo dei Conservatori, where it replaced a group of a lion slaughtering a horse, until then the symbol of senatorial authority. By putting the Wolf front and center, Sixtus was making an argument: papal power, not civic magistracy, was the true heir to imperial Rome. The Capitoline Hill had long been contested ground. The Tabularium, the ancient Roman state archive, sat at its base. By 1144, the Tabularium had already been chosen as the seat of Rome's municipality, making it the oldest town hall in the world. The pope chose this precise location, this charged hilltop, to plant his symbolic stake.

• 3. Michelangelo's Square

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  Paul III commissioned Michelangelo Buonarroti to redesign the entire hilltop on the occasion of Emperor Charles V's visit to Rome in the 16th century. The project was enormous in scope: the renovation of the Palazzo Senatorio, the redesign of the Palazzo dei Conservatori, the construction of an entirely new building across from it, and the placement of major sculptures including the statues of the Tiber and the Nile. Michelangelo died in 1564 before he saw it completed. The Palazzo dei Conservatori's new facade was finished in 1568 by Giacomo Della Porta, who followed Michelangelo's designs closely but added a larger reception room on the first floor, which required a window on the facade noticeably bigger than all the others. The Palazzo Nuovo was built only in the 17th century, under the direction of Girolamo Rainaldi and later his son Carlo Rainaldi, who completed it in 1663. Despite its later construction date, Michelangelo's design for its facade was followed. The two palazzi now face each other across Piazza del Campidoglio in near-perfect symmetry. Among the sculptures Michelangelo himself worked to restore and install was the Fasti Capitolini, the marble records of Roman magistrates, which he is said to have personally helped to recompose from fragments, transferred from the Louvre in 1583.

• 4. Opened to Everyone

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  Pope Clement XII opened the Capitoline Museums to the public in 1734. The official framing at the time was deliberate: this was a place where art could be enjoyed by all, not only by its owners. That year also brought a significant acquisition. Under Clement XII, the museum purchased the collection of Cardinal Alessandro Albani, which included a statue of Antinous found at Hadrian's Villa, the Juno Cesi, and the Satyrs of the Valley, as well as a series of imperial portraits now held in the Hall of Emperors and Philosophers. Five years before the museum opened, in 1714, Clement XI had donated five Egyptian statues found near the Porta Salaria to the collection. The same year the museum opened, Alessandro Gregorio Capponi, the president of the Capitoline Museum, purchased the Dying Gaul from Cardinal Ludovico Ludovisi. The sculpture, now understood as a 3rd-century Roman copy of a Greek bronze original commemorating Attalus I's victory over the Galatians, was initially misidentified as a gladiator falling on his shield. The error did not dull its appeal. It quickly became perhaps the most famous work in the collections and was replicated repeatedly in engravings and drawings throughout that century.

• 5. Napoleon, Canova, and What Remained

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  The late 18th century brought disruption from two directions. The founding of the Pio-Clementino museum within the Vatican Museums in that period intensified rivalry between the papal and civic collections, halting growth at the Campidoglio almost entirely. Then in 1797, Napoleon Bonaparte imposed the Treaty of Tolentino, which required the transfer of some of the collection's most celebrated pieces to the Louvre. The sculptor Antonio Canova, acting as a delegate for the Holy Father, pursued recovery of the stolen works through what the source describes as obstinacy. By 1815, following the fall of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna, Canova had secured the return of the Boy with Thorn, the Capitoline Brutus, the Dying Gaul, and other works. Not everything came back. The Sarcophagus of the Muses, which had arrived at the Campidoglio through the Albani collection, remained in the Louvre. The Capitoline Venus also made this journey: found during the pontificate of Clement X at the basilica of San Vitale, purchased from the Stazi family by Benedict XIV in 1752, taken to Paris in 1797 under the Treaty of Tolentino, and returned to the museum in 1816. Its marble, probably Parian, stands at 193 centimeters tall.

• 6. A Treaty Signed Here

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  On the 25th of March 1957, six nations gathered in the Hall of the Horatii and Curiatii inside the Palazzo dei Conservatori to sign the Treaties of Rome, which established the European Economic Community, the forerunner of the European Union. The six were Belgium, France, West Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands, all already members of the European Coal and Steel Community. The hall they chose for the signing is one of the oldest functioning civic rooms in the city. It had been used for public council meetings since Michelangelo's renovation of the palazzo and is still used for ceremonies today. The collection surrounding that hall includes a fresco cycle by the Sicilian painter Tommaso Laureti, completed between 1586 and 1594 in a style associated with Giulio Romano, Michelangelo, and Raphael, as well as the Hall of Hannibal with its cycle of frescoes depicting the Punic Wars.

• 7. The Collection Room by Room

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  The Hall of Emperors in the Palazzo Nuovo holds 67 portrait busts arranged chronologically along two levels of marble shelves, allowing visitors to trace Roman portraiture from the Republican era to Late Antiquity by walking a single helical route clockwise around the room. At the room's center stands a statue of Flavia Julia Helena, mother of Constantine I. The adjacent Hall of Philosophers holds 79 busts of poets, thinkers, and rhetoricians, beginning with Homer and running through Pindar, Pythagoras, Socrates, and the great Athenian tragedians. The Pinacoteca Capitolina, on the second floor of the Palazzo dei Conservatori, originated from the collection of the Sacchetti family, acquired in 1748 when more than 180 paintings were purchased. It holds work by Caravaggio, Titian, Rubens, Velázquez, Guercino, Annibale Carracci, and others. Caravaggio's The Fortune Teller dates to 1593-1595; his John the Baptist was completed in 1602. The mosaic of the doves in the Hall of Doves was found at Hadrian's Villa and attributed to a Greek mosaicist named Sosus of Pergamon. It gives the room its name and its atmosphere. In the Hall of the Galatian, the Dying Gaul shares space with the Wounded Amazon, attributed by some scholars to Polycletus, donated by Benedict XIV in 1753.

• 8. Beyond the Campidoglio

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  In 1997, rather than simply closing part of the collection during renovations, the Capitoline Museums opened a branch inside a former thermoelectric power station called the Centrale Montemartini in the Ostiense district. The factory had been active as a power station from the 1890s to the 1930s. The pairing of industrial turbines and ancient marble proved so striking that the temporary arrangement became permanent. The branch now holds a permanent collection of 400 ancient sculptures, many excavated from Rome's ancient gardens between the 1890s and 1930s. The main site continued to expand as well. In 2005, a new wing called the Exedra of Marcus Aurelius was inaugurated in December of that year, housing the original Equestrian Statue of Marcus Aurelius inside a glass room. The statue had stood in the center of Piazza del Campidoglio until 1990, when it was moved indoors for conservation; a copy replaced it in the square in 1996. At Villa Caffarelli, a full-scale reconstruction of the Colossus of Constantine was installed in the gardens. Produced by the Factum Foundation for Digital Technology in Preservation in collaboration with Fondazione Prada, the work drew on technical analysis of the original fragments held in the courtyard of the Palazzo dei Conservatori.