The oh-so-aged Capitoline She-Wolf, the fosterer of Romulus and Remus, a fifth-century BCE masterpie
The oh-so-aged Capitoline She-Wolf, the fosterer of Romulus and Remus, a fifth-century BCE masterpiece, right? Wrong!! Although the illustrious Johann Joachim Winckelmann saw the austere lines of archaic Etruscan art in the Lupa Capitolina, he was wrong, like many eighteenth-century archaeologists. Fine, so Cicero talks about this statue, whatever. So what if the story is as old as Rome itself, so what if Livy offers it up as an explanation of Rome’s origin. It doesn’t matter. The fact remains that this sculpture is from the thirteenth century. See, when Rome fell in the west and all the Romans packed up and headed to Constantinople, the westerners forgot how to do stuff like cast bronze. Don’t blame them. Seriously, imagine this: you are holed up on the top of the Esquiline hill while raging Gauls destroy everything between the hills, including the sewer system, so the swamps that have been empty for a thousand years are all full of mosquitos, and then the Gauls are getting malaria so even they have to leave, and now everyone has malaria and cholera and dysentery….are you really that worried about the ancient art of bronze casting? No, you are not. So when the medievals picked it up again in the west they did it differently, and if you really, really looked closely at the Lupa Capitolina you would be able to tell. Uh oh, well it’s supposed to be nearly 3000 years old. Well, it’s 700 years old. I guess that’s old too? What is the difference? -- source link
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