There are other things up here of the Antonine brand, to show that Rome was once Rome; but there is such a variety of job lots here, all curiosities, swept by time into heaps, that the best course is not to puzzle one’s brains about them.
I, for one, wanted to see three things in this Capitol, still so called, but not recalling anything that existed under that name before Boniface IX. took to rebuilding. It is a museum containing a good deal of the private property of the old Roman lords, which belongs now to their natural heirs, and farthest off of kin, the people.
These people had ancestors who were the hereditary property of some seventy or eighty emperors. They are now owners of all these emperors’ heads, and of the heads of all these emperors’ families, which they keep on shelves in their Capitol museum, in a room that makes a sort of Golgotha.
At last we come upon the Dying Gladiator, one of the three figures I was in search of. We have all seen its shadow in casts and engravings; this is the unique original.
Another figure that I had occasion to see was La Bacchante, a marble figure, which is locked up and only shown on the payment of a fee; it is a most expressive statue.
These two figures I have delineated in my “sculptured poem” of Michael Angelo.
A third figure, the Faun, I readily found. It is a celebrated statue, and I desired to ascertain whether the ears were formed correctly; but they were not. In accordance with anatomical structure they should have pointed backwards, but they are erect. Some would say, “Yes; for the ears of lower animals at times are pricked.” But I say (it is in “Valdarno”), the end of all art is repose.
In the human ear may be seen a small rudiment of the elongated ear; it is so placed that, if redeveloped, it would point posteriorly, after the fashion of the lower animals, to the cervix, beneath the occipital bone.
Was it prophetic that, in digging the foundations of the Capitol, when it was first designed, a skull was turned out (caput), whence the name.
Nevertheless, the Capitol was founded upon a rock, though it was the Tarpeian.