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.”