Another inscription goes some way to explain both the quantity and the arrangement of the sculpture in the grotto. In ten lines of Latin verse it describes how a certain Faustinus adorned the cave with sculpture for the pleasure of his Imperial masters, choosing subjects which, Vergil himself would admit, outdid his own poetry. One of the subjects mentioned is Scylla, the fabulous cave-dwelling sea-monster, with a girdle of dogs’ heads about her loins, who guarded the straits of Messina. Now in the cave, carved in the living rock, at the right of the entrance, is the prow of a ship, set with blue, green, yellow, and red mosaic, and presenting some evidence of having once had a marble superstructure. To this ship Iacopi would assign some of his key figures: a bearded Ulysses in a seaman’s cap, his face expressing horror; a lovely archaic statuette of Athena ([Fig. 7.3]), grasped by a huge hand (Athena might be the figurehead); Scylla’s gigantic hand seizing a seaman by the hair, and a terrified mariner who has taken refuge from Scylla at the ship’s prow. A niche carved in the rock above the ship would be an appropriate vantage-point for Scylla herself; in one fragment one of her dog’s heads has bitten deep into a sailor’s shoulder. It is true that the mosaic names the ship Argo, but Iacopi explains this as a generic name for a ship, not necessarily referring to the one that bore the Argonauts.
If Iacopi is right about this group, it was a baroque or even rococo effect that Faustinus arranged for his Imperial masters. But the Laocoön and Scylla groups by no means exhausted his fancy or his pocketbook: there was Menelaus with the body of Patroclus, Ganymede borne to heaven by an eagle (carved so as to be seen to best effect from below, and therefore possibly belonging to a pedimental treatment of the cave façade). There are heads of gods and heroes, satyrs and fauns, a charming Cupid trying on a satyr’s mask, a delightful head of a baby with ringlets over the ears—all in the fanciful, complex, sometimes tortured baroque style of Hellenistic Pergamum and Rhodes. These are all of fine crystalline Greek island marble, so that they may be Greek originals. The soapy native Carrara stone is normally used in Roman copies—and in too much modern American church sculpture.
Fig. 7.3 Sperlonga, Cave “of Tiberius.” Head of archaic statuette of Athena. (Iacopi, op. cit., Fig. 11)
Fig. 7.4 Nemi, Braschi finds (1895) from ships. (G. Ucelli, Le navi di Nemi, p. 19)
At the present writing the Sperlonga cave cannot be said to have yielded up all its secrets. It is not even certain that the equipping of Tiberius’ outdoor dining-room as a lavish baroque museum took place in Tiberius’ lifetime, for the donor, Faustinus, may be the rich villa-owner of that name who was a friend of the poet Martial, and therefore of Domitianic date. The residents of Sperlonga want the sculpture kept where it was found, to entice tourists; the archaeologists want to take it to Rome for analysis and reconstruction. Meanwhile, definitive conclusions are impossible. But one thing is certain: the bizarre taste of the place, whether Tiberius’ or Domitian’s, is characteristic of the first century of the Empire, and reflects the gap between the ostentatious rich and the church-mouse poor which was one day to contribute to the Empire’s fall.
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The same fantastic extravagance marks our next finds. Seventeen miles southeast of Rome, cupped in green volcanic hills, lies the beautiful deep blue Lake of Nemi, the mirror of Diana. Here divers, as long ago as 1446, reported, lying on the bottom in from sixteen to sixty-nine feet of water, two ships, presumably ancient Roman. A descent was made in a diving bell in 1535. Another attempt in 1827 used a large raft with hoists and grappling irons, and an art dealer tried again in 1895, but all three efforts were chiefly successful in damaging the hulls, tearing away great chunks without being able to raise the Ships to the surface. The 1895 attempt did, however, produce a mass of tantalizing fragments ([Fig. 7.4]): beams; lead water-pipe; ball-bearings; a number of objects in bronze, including animal heads holding rings in their teeth, a Medusa, and a large flat hand; terracotta revetment plaques, a quantity of rails and spikes, and a large piece of decking in mosaic. This treasure-trove, displayed in the Terme Museum, naturally whetted appetites, not least Mussolini’s. He determined to get at the ships by lowering the level of the lake, a colossal task undertaken eagerly by civil and naval engineers enthusiastic about classical civilization. The job was made easier, but no less expensive, because there existed an ancient artificial outlet, a tunnel a mile long, dating from the reign of Claudius, which could be used to carry off the overflow. The pumps were started on October 20, 1928, in the presence of the Duce. After various vicissitudes over a space of four years, the lake level was lowered seventy-two feet, and by November, 1932, the first ship was installed in a hangar on the shore, and the second ([Fig. 7.5]) lay exposed in the mud.
The ships proved to be enormous by ancient standards, of very shallow draft, very broad in the beam (one was sixty-six feet wide, the other seventy-eight) and respectively 234 and 239 feet long ([Fig. 7.6]). They were larger than some of the early Atlantic liners. Their 1100 tons burden gave them ten times the tonnage of Columbus’ largest ship.