Rome’s newest museum: The Museum of Rescued Art

photo by Larry Litman (all photos except as noted are by Litman)

Exciting recent news out of Rome: the opening of a museum dedicated to stolen – and recovered – works, rather than one-off shows such as those held once in a while in Castel Sant’Angelo’s exhibition space or the Carabinieri museum, as occurred in 2016.

Now there’s a beautifully refurbished space that Rome resident Larry Litman (retired AmBrit librarian) recently visited and writes about here (more on Larry’s bio later in this post).

Before we launch into Larry’s first-hand guide to the new museum and his many photos of the Carabinieris' marvelous finds, we'll explore some of the hot topic news and issues surrounding the museum and the works.

Hardly a week goes by without news of “stolen” artworks being discovered in places far from where they were taken. Just this month, the New York Times reported 27 ancient artifacts, valued at $13 million, were seized from the venerable Metropolitan Museum of Art. Interestingly, it’s the Manhattan District Attorney’s office that seized the items at 3 separate times, including 21 Italian pieces taken from the Met in July, pieces that are similar to the head of Esculapius, below, from the current Rome exhibit. (One has to wonder, as one does these days, why did they have to seize the works? Why didn't the Met willingly turn them over?)

This head of Esculapius, above,
copied from a Greek original,
is from the late 2nd-3rd
century AD and was taken from the
Baths of Caracalla in Rome.

A few days earlier, the FBI Art Crime Team reported in a news release that it had recently returned to Italy a 2000-year-old mosaic. “The enormous work had been cut into 16 pieces and stored in individual pallets in a Los Angeles storage facility since the 1980s. Each pallet weighed between 75 and 200 pounds.”

We, at RST, are familiar with the art recovery section of the Italian national police, the Carabinieri Tutela Patrimonio Culturale, or TPC (Cultural Heritage Protection Squad), but we hadn’t known of the Manhattan DA’s interest in these objects, nor the FBI's – it seems they have enough else going on these days!

Special Agents Elizabeth Rivas and Allen Grove traveled
to Italy for the repatriation of the mosaic to its home in Rome 
- photo from FBI news release.

Similarly flanking their "prize," the Carabinieri
at their 2016 news conference on art (which
we attended and covered in a post) they
had recovered, in this case a Canaletto, from
the 18th century (photo by William Graebner).

The “recovered” artworks raise multiple issues, including how a country such as Italy or Greece or even Ethiopia (more about Ethiopia in a future post) can conserve, protect, and display these objects. Italy has taken the approach of returning them to the regions from which they came, a somewhat controversial position.

Outside their storage area, next to Santa Maria
a Ripa in Trastevere, we saw the Carabinieri's 
art truck promoting their "100 opere tornano a casa" -
"100 works return home." (Photo by William Graebner)

This year in Rome we saw the area in Trastevere where the recovered artworks are – temporarily one hopes – stored. And then there’s the issue of where do the objects really belong? What about Greek vessels that were spoils of war in Greece, brought to Rome, and then stolen from Italy? To which region or country should they be returned?

Larry notes “Several years ago I visited Aidone in Sicily to see an amazing statue of Venus returned from the Getty museums in Los Angeles and a collection of Silver Plates from the Met. The region built a museum in a redundant convent to house these items and other artifacts from the area.” The long saga of the Getty's involvement in stolen works, including lawsuits and criminal actions, are well-reported in David Price Williams's 2015 "Looking for Aphrodite." The Getty also helped restore items for the Aidone museum, and put some of the objects on display (this time, on loan) at the Getty Villa in Los Angeles, a sort of reciprocity (we were fortunate to see Venus in Los Angeles, before she left for Sicily). So, maybe there’s an advantage to spreading this “wealth” around. Although New York Times' writer Elizabeth Polvoledo had a different experience from Larry's in the once-Etruscan hub of Cerveteri, near Rome, where the museum did not have the staff to stay open (see caption under Larry's photo of the Etruscan female antefix below).

Journalist and author Sari Gilbert also used a stolen Etruscan vessel as the key to her intriguing murder mystery set in 1980s Rome, "Deadline Rome: the Vatican Kylix," which we reviewed here. As noted above, current, exciting, hot topics involving 2000-year-old art.

This is RST's 4th post from our "man [almost always] on the ground" in Rome, Larry Litman. Larry wrote eloquently in March 2020 about being in Rome under one of the first lockdowns. He gave a virtual tour of the unusual presepi or crèches in Piazza San Pietro (St. Peter’s Square) that year when almost no one was there to see them, and he was one of the first (as he is this time) to see the inside of the Tomb of Augustus, newly opened last year.

Larry is a retired teacher/librarian from Ambrit International School and is active at St. Paul's Within the Walls (the Episcopal Church on via Nazionale). He also volunteers at the Non-Catholic Cemetery. 

Rome’s newest museum: The Museum of Rescued Art - by Larry Litman 

Entrance (after you've purchased your ticket
around the block), still with "Planetario"
above the doorway.

In June the Rome Museum of Rescued Art (Museo dell’Arte Salvata) opened in the Octagonal Hall of the Baths of Diocletian, a 3rd century AD space within the ancient baths that many Romans identify as the Old Planetarium. (The new Planetarium is in the modern neighborhood of EUR and was built in 1928.) [Note to RST readers, the Planetarium is where the Museo della civiltà romana used to be, making the cover of our Modern Rome guidebook now misleading. Bill’s office, when he taught at La Sapienza in 1993, overlooked the Old Planetarium, now the Museum of Rescued Art.]

 

A 2nd century AD copy of a Greek statue
 of Doriforous by Polyleitos,
from the Baths of Caracalla;
so presumably it will stay in Rome.

The Museum of Rescued Art will present changing exhibitions of objects recovered by the Carabinieri unit for the Protection of Cultural Heritage.

For the foreseeable future there will be enough recovered items to keep the museum going. It’s giving a visible profile of the Carabinieri unit involved, discouraging theft and encouraging restitution/return.

 

This initial exhibition features about 100 objects from more than 200 artifacts, dated from the 6th century BC to the 3rd century AD, stolen over the past 50 years, that were returned to Italy from the United States between December 2021 and June 2022. The New York Times, in a piece about the new museum, called this location a “pit stop,” because all objects at some point will be returned to their places of origin in Italy.

 

An Etruscan female antefix
(ornaments at the eaves of a
building), from the beginning
of the 5th century BC. It's
unclear where this statue will
end up, possibly in a special
museum in Cerveteri, home to
many Etruscan artifacts. 
But that museum does not have 
the funds to stay open much,
according to Elizabeth Polvoledo
in her New York Times piece,
cited above..

The soaring dome of the Octagonal Hall [photo at top of post] is an impressive environment for this new Museum of Rescued Art. 

 

Admission for the National Roman Museum also allows entrance to the exhibition of recently returned artifacts. (Note: You must buy the admission ticket at the main museum entrance facing Termini Station and then walk around the block, through Piazza della Repubblica, to enter the Museum of Rescued Art.)

 

Explanatory panels on the display cases are in Italian and English, identifying the objects in each case as well as presenting a narrative about the work of the Carabinieri to identify stolen art and negotiate the return of works from private collectors, museums and galleries with the cooperation of authorities in the United States.

More photos and descriptions follow.

Ceremonial Kramer with four handles
surmounted by red impasto bowls
overpainted with white ("white on red"),
produced in Northern Lazio.

Decorated Etruscan terracotta storage
vessels. Again, one wonders where these
objects will end up.

Statue of Artemis, 2nd century AD,
from the Baths of Caracalla.

Etruscan olpe (pitcher) made
 in a Corinthian style with animal friezes,
first half, 6th century BC.

Black and white painted terracotta vessel
from the ancient town of Crustumerium,
a site now identified about 10 miles north
of Rome near Settebagni, 7th century BC.

Brown cremation urn in the shape of a house
with figured decorations (horse, soldier and boat)
on the walls and on the lid. 7th century BC.

Etruscan terracotta votive heads,
8th century BC.

How Romans Peed - Celebrating World Toilet Day

In celebration of World Toilet Day, November 19, we offer some thoughts on Roman toilets. To be clear, we aren't being flip about World Toilet Day.  Its goal is worthy - to make sure everyone has a safe toilet by 2030.

The Romans were masters at building and plumbing, as we all know.  It seems obvious that expertise would extend to toilets, and so it did.  The amount of research on Roman toilets is enormous.  We offer only a few examples and thoughts here.

The old Roman seaport city of Ostia, now Ostia Antica, is on a Top Ten list for most Rome visitors. And one can't go there without seeing its common latrine, or sitting on it (hopefully they still let you do that!). RST guest blogger, Martha Bakerjian, featured this photo in her March 6 post this year:

Gemma Jansen, a Dutch historian who may have the distinction of being the world's expert on Roman toilets, published an exceedingly thorough catalog and description of all the toilets at Hadrian's Villa (Villa Adriana, near Tivoli, just outside of Rome).  She says the multi-seaters, which the above photo illustrates,

 "are easy to detect by the remnants of seats above a deep gutter, in front of which was a small gutter in which the toilet sponge could be rinsed. This small gutter is not sunk in the floor, but normally placed on the floor so that it doubles as a foot-rest. The gutter was generally built of bricks or roughly cut into travertine blocks; only a few toilets had sponge gutters of marble. In most cases the toilet seats were made of wood, but in some cases they are of travertine or marble."

I don't want to think too hard about it, but apparently the "sponge stick" is not a universally accepted historical artifact. The above quotation is from an article by Jansen titled "Social Distinctions and Issues of Privacy in the Toilets of Hadrian's Villa."  She also notes the multi-user toilets did not offer much privacy inside, but offered a great deal of privacy from the outside.

The private, single toilet is sometimes hard to distinguish from a nymphaeum, since they both have running water and a drain.  There are at least 19 single toilets, and several small nymphaeums in Hadrian's Villa. Jansen says, 

This is the Caracalla toilet, pilfered from the Baths of 

Caracalla around 1800. The British Museum's description

is as follows: "An ancient Bath-chair of the Pavonazzo

 marble, so called by the Italians. In the centre of the seat

is a hollow space in the form of an extended horseshoe,

 thro which the steam was received [sounds like a fancy

 Toto brand]. On each side a wheel is worked in relief,

 in imitation no doubt, of such  wheel-chairs, as were

 at that time executed in wood, resembling in some 

 degree the chairs of this day, placed on wheels for the 

 use of lame persons."

"The single toilets of the emperor and his high-ranking guests offered much more privacy. A striking discovery is the single-seat toilets for guests. From ancient sources it is clear that even high officials might use multi-seaters, and those found at the baths of Hadrian's Villa confirm this, but the provision of single-seaters specially for guests shows that, when space and money were no object, they preferred single toilets."

The toilets' size and shape, the fact that there apparently are no urinals, and the reading of some statues have raised the question of how Roman males held their penises when they peed.  Jansen is trying to determine if they simply sat when they peed, and then that they held their penises to hide them. Showing a statue (from the British Museum) of a boy peeing, she states, "the penis shows a completely different way of thinking, because the Romans and Greeks wanted their penises to be small. Because that was beautiful."

At a recent small group tour of The Los Angeles County Museum of Art's exhibition, "To Rome and Back: Individualism and Authority in Art, 1500-1800" (on until March 17), we had a lengthy discussion on penis size while viewing The Bateman Mercury (below). 

Our guide, an expert in Greek and Roman statues, talked about the research of one of her fellow graduate students into penis size in ancient Greece and Rome.  That researcher came to the same conclusion as Jansen, that a smaller penis was more desirable.  The larger penis, she said, was associated with satyrs, who could not control their libidos, and control was a virtue in the ancient world.

For more on Roman styles of peeing and Roman toilets, including those found throughout the world:

Caroline Lawrence is an indefatigable, if hippy-dippy, source. I quoted above from a sit-down interview she had with Jansen, which is reported in excruciating detail on The History Girls blogspot. Here she speculates on 10 things Romans used for toilet paper (including the pine cone - ouch! worse than my Italian grandmother's Sears catalog pages). And here she writes about the sewers of Herculaneum.  She also writes kids' Roman mystery books.

The latrines in the Baths of the Laberii at

 Uthina  (Tunisia) (from Carole's "Following

Hadrian" blog).

On her English language blog, Following Hadrian, French blogger, Carole, has an amazing collection of her own photos of Roman toilets throughout the Western - and North African - world. These include several more photos of the Ostia Antica latrines, as well as the Tunisian one at left.

There's a nice post by Stephanie Pappas on Pompeians having upstairs toilets on the Live Science blog. (Photo from her blog below.)

Barry Hobson's 2009 book is Latrinae Et Foricae: Toilets in the Roman World. 

Jansen has published widely on Roman toilets. She edited a 2011 book, "Roman Toilets, Their Archaeology and Cultural History."  (Okay, at $58, no, I didn't get it.)

Dianne

Monumental Sculpture meets Monumental Site: Mauro Staccioli and the Baths of Caracalla

Mauro Staccioli's "Portale," 2014.  An opening,
rather than a closing off.  Compare with Staccioli's contribution to the 1978 Biennale, below.

The Baths of Caracalla are always impressive--a Rome-the-First-Time experience, to be sure.  But for the next ten days or so the Baths are a special treat.  Through September 30, this monumental complex is the site an equally monumental set of sculptures by Italian artist Mauro Staccioli.  Titled "Sensibile ambientale" (environmental sensibility), the show is the first retrospective of the work of Staccioli, who died at age 80 on January 1, 2018.

Curated by Alberto Fiz, the exhibition features 26 pieces, some outside, above ground, and some inside, along the underground passages of the Baths.

Tuscan by birth, Staccioli received his arts education at the Art Institute in Volterra, taught in Cagliari (Sardinia) for some years after 1960, before joining the Academy of Fine Arts of Brera in Milan in 1968.




Invited to exhibit at the Venice Biennale in 1978, he fashioned the wall that made him famous, even notorious: a 26-foot concrete barrier, provocatively obstructing the view of the Italian pavilion.





Working in a minimalist vein, Staccioli favored basic geometric forms but on a grand scale.  His passion was the relationship of a work of art to its environment.  Writing in Art Forum in 1995, critic Giorgio Verzotti wrote, " In his indoor as well as in his outdoor installations, Mauro Staccioli's sculptures set up a tension between the work itself and the exhibition site."

In selecting the Baths for the retrospective (we assume he was involved in that process before his death), Staccioli took on an unusual challenge.  Although many of his sculptures are huge and inherently imposing--not unlike the iron behemoths of Richard Serra--the Baths are monumental on a scale all their own.

In some cases, then, the "tension" between the work and the site is a tension between monumentalisms--the Baths on the one hand, Staccioli's sculptures on the other.  In some cases, though certainly not all, the Baths swallow, absorb, and minimize Staccioli's work, as in the photo below.

Here, Staccioli's ring sculpture is dominated by the Baths

In others--perhaps especially the interior pieces--the sculptor's creations hold their own, dominate, or (see below) simply enhance the look and feel of the Baths.  Dianne at right.

Although Staccioli did not live to see the exhibition installed, we like to think he would have enjoyed all the complex ways in which his work interacts with one of the most dramatic sites in Rome.

Visitors may (assuming it's still there) also enjoy Michelangelo Pistoletto's nicely lit "The Replenished Apple," which resides in one of the underground chambers.

Pistoletto's "The Replenished Apple"

Staccioli has permanent installations at a dozen or more locations around the world, including the Olympic Park in Seoul, the Parc Tournay-Solvay in Brussels, and Villa Glori in Rome.  Whether permanent or not, a powerful and elegant Staccioli piece fronts the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna, on via Belle Arti (below). 

The Staccioli exhibit at the Baths of Carcalla closes September 30, 2018.   Bill

Staccioli's magnificent addition to the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna

McKim, Mead and White in Rome

Rome the Second Time is proud to present its 400th post.  We are grateful to our readers for their appreciation of our content and tolerance of our eccentricities. 

There is only one monument in Rome to McKim, Mead and White, the New York City-based firm that dominated American architecture in the half century after 1880--some 1,000 commissions, dozens of reknowned buildings.  It is the building housing the American Academy in Rome, still there and still operating more than one hundred years after its completion in 1913/14.  It is a gracious structure, superb in its balance and proportion, restrained in its ornamentation, representing the genteel tradition in architecture as fully as Henry James did for the novel. [As an update, we note an exhibition on the design and construction of the AAR building - a merely okay not a must-see exhibition -  is at the Academy, open 4 to 7 p.m. Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays through June 29, 2014.]

McKim's NYS pavilion, 1893,
modeling the Villa Medici

Indeed, the firm's link to the American Academy goes beyond the structure.  Although most of his knowledge of continental architecture was from books, and he did not see Rome until 1885, Charles Follen McKim was enamoured of European architecture.  Though he favored Italian over French design, McKim valued the French system of architectural training, and he would have been pleased to have studied Rome's architectural heritage at the French Academy, housed in the the Villa Medici--had he been a citizen.  Convinced that travel to Europe and physical immersion in its architectural splendors was essential to becoming an architect, McKim joined with another distinguished architect in the genteel tradition, Daniel Burnham, to found a post-graduate facility for architects in Rome--what became the American Academy.  The two solicited contributions from friends and fellow architects and brought the first class to Rome in 1895, where they were housed in temporary quarters.  The first painters and sculptors arrived in 1897. 

Stanford White's Washington Square arch

Rome was influential in some of the firm's most important works.  The Washington Memorial Arch, the signature of Washington Square, was designed by the flamboyant Stanford White, who based its shape on encyclopedic knowledge of the precise dimensions of dozens of Roman and Roman imperial arches.  McKim based his design for the New York State pavilion at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair (above left) on the Villa Medici, and, according to one architectural historian, used his knowledge of the upper stage of the nymphaeum of the Villa Giulia (mid-16th century) to compose the facade of the Morgan Library in New York City.  Facade inscriptions on McKim's University Club in New York City, though critically received by its members, were incorporated into the final design when McKim explained that inscriptions were common to a variety of Rome structures, including Palazzo Spada, Porta Maggiore and Porta del Popolo, and the Acqua Paola fountain. 

To catch a glimpse of the most famous McKim, Mead and White building inspired by Rome, you'll have to go to New Jersey and dig around in its swamps and marshes.  "Tossed into the Secaucus graveyard," wrote Ada Louise Huxtable, architectural critic of the New York Times, "are about 25 centuries of classical culture and the standards of style, elegance and grandeur that it gave to the dreams and constructions of Western man."  She was referring to the Pennsylvania Station, arguably the most glorious and surely the most famous of the many structures designed by the firm, torn down between 1963 and 1965 (to make way for a skyscraper and a new Madison Square Garden), in what Lewis Mumford called "an irresponsible act of public vandalism." 

Construction of the Pennsylvania Station began in 1904 and was completed in 1910, in the midst of the presidency of William Howard Taft.  The design was McKim's, as was the decision to exclude a high-rise hotel desired by the railroad--a decision, according to historian Leland M. Roth, that doomed the building to its Secaucus fate.  It was enormous in every sense: 430 X 780 feet, two whole city blocks, sitting on 650 steel columns and, because of the unusual terrain, the trains were out of the way, 45 feet below street level.

Pennsylvania Station waiting room

It is well known that McKim's design--apparently worked out with Alexander Cassatt, brother of the painter, Mary Cassatt--was profoundly influenced by the monumentality and grandeur of the Baths of Caracalla (212-216 AD).  McKim had hired people to amble through the Baths so he could get a sense of scale and of human movement through its large spaces. 

A reconstruction of the Baths of Caracalla

Though the Station was bigger than the Baths--the general waiting room was some 20% larger--it was proportional to the ancient structure, and the waiting room of the Station was modeled on the Baths' tepidarium, or warm room (right and end of post).   Unlike the Baths, the vaults of McKim's Station were not structural; they only defined the space.  The Corinthian columns were sheathed in travertine from near Tivoli. 

Pennsylvania Station concourse

The Concourse--where travelers descended to the trains--was an airy delight, "one of the marvels of early twentieth-century engineering," according to Roth, and reminiscent of Giovanni Battista Piranesi's 18th-century etchings of imaginary prisons, according to architectural critic Martin Filler.  Outside, McKim's colonnade took inspiration from the Bank of England and Bernini's Piazza di San Pietro. 

Pennsylvania Station, colonnade

The Pennsylvania Station was much admired for many years, and its neo-classical monumentality remained a popular form on Washington's mall and in the late-1930s suburb of EUR, where Mussolini's Fascist regime adapted the style to modernism.   As the years went by, and enthusiasm for modernism--and modernist forms of the monumental, like the Empire State Building, or the glass box housing the United Nations--grew, the Station fell out of favor.  It was allowed to accumulate an unsightly layer of dirt and grime, and by the early 1960s, before there was much interest in conserving important old buildings, its defenders were too few to make a difference.  Frank Lloyd Wright's massive Larkin Administration Building in Buffalo came to a similar end in 1950.  And today, to experience what McKim had in mind, you'll have to buy a ticket to the Baths of Caracalla, or head for the wetlands of New Jersey, trowel in hand.

Bill

Design for a proposed reconstruction of the Tepidarium, Baths of Caracalla, 1889