THE MUSEUM OF THE CAPITOL.
This museum is situated in two wings, on the right and left of the Capitoline hill. They do not form a part of the same structure. It is exceedingly instructive, as the statues are very numerous; and we can not doubt that they exhibit faithfully the persons of the ancient Romans, with their features and costumes. Many of the most distinguished Roman emperors, poets, historians, and orators, are represented in marble or bronze; Trajan, Caligula, Hadrian, Nero, Nerva, Julius Cæsar and his murderer Brutus, Cicero, Virgil, Caracalla, and a multitude more. Some of the statues are colossal. There are several parts of an immense statue of Nero, which was designed to be one hundred and fifty feet high, and to rival in altitude the Coliseum itself. In crime and infamy, he was indeed a colossus. His countenance has a groveling, animal expression, very strongly marked in a bust contained in a private museum, where, as if to correspond with the blackness of his character, he is sculptured in basalt, or black marble.
“We saw in the museum of the Capitol,” says Professor Silliman, “the original of that bust of Cicero, which represents him as a large man with a full face and round head, the very reverse of the bust formerly said to be Cicero’s, and which I saw in 1805 in the Earl of Pembroke’s palace, near Salisbury, England. That bust made Cicero’s features lean, muscular, and sharp, with a wart on the right cheek, near the nose. Artists and antiquaries have no doubt, I believe, of the authenticity of the bust in the Capitol, which bears his name, and was found in a villa of Mecænas. An excellent copy of this bust, by our countryman, Crawford, is in the Trumbull gallery in Yale college, along with copies by the same artist of the busts of Demosthenes and Homer, the originals of which we saw in the Capitol museum. In this museum is also to be seen the celebrated Venus of the Capitol, to which a separate saloon is devoted. The dying Gladiator is in a room with other noble antique statues. Byron has completely embalmed this figure in his memorable description in the fifth canto of Childe Harold’s pilgrimage. It is probable that the artist himself, could he have read the passage, would have confessed that it expressed his sentiment even more perfectly than the marble. Any one who has traversed Italy with Byron in his hand, will readily appreciate not only the wonderful fidelity of his descriptions, but that all other language seems poverty-stricken and unmeaning when compared with the masterly touches by which he has painted the various monuments of antiquity which adorn his pictured page. For example, besides the passage just alluded to, we have his tomb of Cecilia Metella, the Thunder-stricken Nurse of Rome! the Coliseum, the Pantheon, and St. Peter’s, &c. The original bronze wolf, representing the early nursing of Romulus and Remus, is in the Capitol museum. The little urchins, also in bronze, are eagerly drawing from the savage wet-nurse the means of life. This fable affords not an unapt symbol of the ferocious disposition of Romulus, who slew his brother, and of most of the Roman people, of whatever rank, to whom human blood seems to have been a delightful nectar. There has been much discussion as to the antiquity of this wolf. It appears probable that this is the image referred to by Cicero; and it bears marks of having been struck by lightning, according to tradition. There is a large piece of metal torn out of one of the hind legs of the wolf, and this is stated by tradition to have happened from a thunder-stroke, (to which, of course, Byron alludes in his immortal lines,) which fell upon the wolf the moment when it was announced in the Capitol that Julius Cæsar was dead.”