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One warm summer evening, as sunset gilded the crosses and cupolas of central Rome, I
spent an hour exploring the Vatican’s Chiaramonti Museum.
The museum consists of a single vaulted corridor, lined by hundreds of Roman statues.
Emperors stand with philosophers, merchants beside matrons, soldiers by freed slaves.
Despite their variety, I noticed, virtually all of these statues had one thing in common:
their noses had been broken.
Statues were indispensable ornaments of the classical city.
They stood sentry over tombs, gazed down from the galleries of theaters, and garnished the
gardens and villas of the rich.
Each temple was centered on a magnificent likeness of its indwelling deity; every sanctuary
shone with portraits of worshippers and gods.
Busts of the emperors presided in courtrooms, and petrified dignitaries crowded the boulevards,
their pedestals proclaiming services to city and state, their ranks multiplying with the
centuries.
By late antiquity, the city of Rome boasted nearly four thousand bronze statues, and as
many marble statues – it was said – as living men.
Although classical sculptors employed many materials – some temples, for example, sheltered
images carved from wood or hewn from meteorites, while others gloried in gods of gold and ivory
– most freestanding statues were made of bronze or marble.
The tensile strength of bronze made possible both the dynamic poses favored by the Classical
era’s greatest sculptors and the vast scale of the Colossus of Rhodes, which was roughly
the size of the Statue of Liberty.
But in most periods and places, marble was the material of choice.
There were many varieties – translucent Parian, purple-veined Phrygian, pallid Luna
– which were quarried, by the Roman imperial era, on a proto-industrial scale that scattered
marble statues from Britain to Syria.
Before explaining why so few of those statues have survived intact to the present day, I’d
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Back to statues.
During late antiquity, the glittering ranks of statues that adorned cities and sanctuaries
across the classical world began to be decimated.
Bronze – used in everything from coins to cannonballs – was scavenged early and often,
to the point that virtually every bronze statue above ground during the Middle Ages was melted
down.
The survival rate for marble statues, fortunately, was higher; and although thousands were burned
to produce lime, sheer quantity ensured that thousands more would survive to the Renaissance.
Most of these marble survivors – to return to our initial topic – are missing their
original noses.
In some cases, this reflects deliberate mutilation.
During the fourth and fifth centuries, Christians destroyed statues that represented the old
gods.
At Alexandria, a mob dismembered and burned a great statue of the god Serapis.
A bishop led a detachment of soldiers through the temples and palaces of Gaza, smashing
every “idol” he found.
An inscription discovered at Ephesus records how a statue of Artemis was broken and replaced
with a cross, and the pediments of the Parthenon still bear the scars of statues torn down
when the building was converted into a church.
Although such destruction was far from universal – in most cases, only the most prominent
images of the old gods were targeted – ancient statues that survived into the Middle Ages
tended to be seen as dangerous curiosities, prone to demonic possession and enchantment
by magicians.
In an effort to neutralize their malignant power, crosses were sometimes cut into their
foreheads and bodies.
And in Roman Egypt, at least, their noses were broken.
Since the pharaonic period, the Egyptians had regarded statues as receptacles for the
essence of the gods and the spirits of the dead, and as the instruments through which
gods and spirits could communicate with the living.
Such communion, however, was predicated on the physical integrity of the statue.
If its ears were broken, it could not hear; and if its nose were destroyed, the spirit
within, unable to breathe, would die.
Knowing this, Egyptian Christians sometimes “killed” ancient statues by smashing their
noses.
Outside Egypt, however, there is no evidence that noses were deliberately targeted.
In most cases, a statue’s nose seems to have simply broken when it fell – as statues
almost always did, sooner or later.
Most of the Mediterranean is prone to strong earthquakes, and these shocks have sent statues
– including the Colossus of Rhodes, snapped at the knees by a tremor – tumbling since
antiquity.
Whether felled by earthquake, vandalism, or simple age, marble statues tended to shatter
along a few points of vulnerability.
The most obvious of these was the neck, but the limbs – especially if outstretched – were
almost equally fragile.
And if a statue fell forward or was struck in the face by rubble, its nose would break.
This rule is disguised by the fact that, from the Renaissance until the nineteenth century,
it was standard practice to restore the broken noses and limbs of ancient statues.
Cellini, Bernini, and many other artists earned a substantial part of their income from restoration
work, which sometimes extended to the point of creating entirely new works from ancient
fragments.
As I walked through the Chiaramonti Museum on that warm summer afternoon, I could see,
on statue after statue, the hairline cracks betraying a replacement nose.
But after a while, I stopped noticing.
I was too entranced by that long gallery and its thousand portraits, which looked – I
imagined – much as the heart of Rome must have looked, before the statues fell.
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You might also enjoy my book, Naked Statues, Fat Gladiators, and War Elephants.
Thanks for watching.