The Capitoline Museums (Italian: Musei Capitolini) are a group of art and archaeological museums located on the Capitoline Hill in Rome, Italy, and constitute the main civic museum complex of the city. Their principal buildings are the Palazzo dei Conservatori and the Palazzo Nuovo, which face each other across Piazza del Campidoglio, the square designed by Michelangelo in 1536 and completed over the course of the following centuries.
The museums are primarily dedicated to the art and history of ancient Rome, with a particular emphasis on Roman sculpture. The collection include celebrated works such as the Equestrian Statue of Marcus Aurelius, the Capitoline Wolf and the Dying Gaul, alongside inscriptions, coins, and other artifacts illustrating the civic and religious life of the city. The museums also include Renaissance and Baroque paintings, as well as the richly frescoed walls of the Conservators' Apartment in the Palazzo dei Conservatori, which depict scenes from Rome's early history.
The Capitoline Museums traces the collection's origins to 1471, when Pope Sixtus IV donated to the people of Rome a collection of ancient bronzes from the Lateran. In 1734 Pope Clement XII opened the museum to the public, making them among the earliest museums in the world accessible to all citizens. Today, the Capitoline Museums continue to attract visitors from around the world, hosting temporary exhibitions alongside their permanent collections and serving as a major cultural landmark in Rome.
History
15th century
The history of the museum can be traced to 1471, when Pope Sixtus IV donated a collection of important ancient bronzes to the people of Rome, until then kept in the Lateran Palace and donated to the Roman people: the Capitoline Wolf, the Camillus (statue), the Boy with Thorn and two fragments of a colossal statue of Domitian (the head and a hand holding a globe). As the inscription preserved in the Palazzo dei Conservatori specifies, it is not a donation but a "restitution": «he judged that these remarkable bronze statues, testimony to the ancient greatness of the Roman people who had them made, had to be returned and donated without reservations» : these works of art had constituted the thesaurus Romanitatis, representing a sort of heritage of the ancient world that the Church had collected and jealously guarded throughout the Middle Ages.
Sixtus IV chose to house the bronzes on the Capitoline Hill, then dominated by the ancient Palazzo Senatorio, also built on the remains of the Tabularium, home of the Roman archives. The Wolf is placed on the facade of the Palazzo dei Conservatori and becomes the symbol of Rome, replacing the group of the Lion slaughtering a horse, present until then, symbol of the legal functions of the senatorial authority and the only sculpture present on the Capitoline Hill before the donation of Sixtus IV. This donation symbolizes the continuity between imperial Rome and the temporal power of the Church, affirming the predominance of papal power on the Capitoline Hill, making this ancient hill the very symbol of the historical memory of Rome, in contrast to the role of driving force of civil autonomy that the Capitoline magistrates later strenuously defended.
16th century
The collection of antiquities was enriched over time by donations from various popes who increased the museum's collections. Between the end of the 15th century and the middle of the 16th century, important ancient sculptures, piled up in front of the Palazzo dei Conservatori, of immense historical and artistic value, flowed into the Campidoglio, confirming the role of the hill as a public museum of antiquities. Thus the gilded Hercules, found in the Forum Boarium at the time of Sixtus IV, quickly joined the original group of bronzes. Purchased by the conservators, it was placed on a high plinth in front of their palace as a "monument to the glory of Rome", before being moved to the courtyard, where it was represented by Maarten van Heemskerck (1532–1537), then transferred inside the palace to the apartment of the Conservators.
In 1513, two colossal statues of river gods, found in the Baths of Constantine (Rome) at the Quirinale, were placed next to the entrance to the palace: these sculptures from the era of Trajan were added in 1588–1589, to those that already decorated the monumental staircase leading to the Palazzo Senatorio.
In 1515, three large high-relief panels depicting scenes from the life of Marcus Aurelius were purchased. They belonged to the sculptural decoration of an honorary monument erected to this emperor on the occasion of his triumph in 176 AD. Complete expressions of sculpture with a historical subject in Roman art, they serve to underline the ideal continuity between the ancient world and the Renaissance in the Campidoglio. As early as 1523, the Venetian ambassadors defined the Capitoline collections as "the most beautiful and most famous in the world".
In 1541, on the main facade of the courtyard, in a niche overlooking the entrance, a large statue of Athena was installed, discovered and donated to the civil magistracy at the time of Paul III. It was used under Sixtus V as a central element of the decoration of the grand staircase of the senatorial palace designed by Michelangelo. Michelangelo, according to the testimony of Onofrio Panvinio, contributed himself to the recomposition of the fragments found and to their architectural presentation in the Campidoglio: the Fasti Capitolini, transferred in 1583 from the current room of the Louvre, were then recomposed according to the artist's design while undergoing, on this occasion, profound modifications.
In 1566, Pius V donated a lot of thirty statues from the Palazzo del Belvedere (Vatican), considering it inappropriate for the successor of Peter (apostle) to keep pagan idols in his home. A considerable number of works of art thus arrived at the Campidoglio, where they enriched the "statuario", subsequently transferred to the ground floor of the Palazzo dei Conservatori. Some statues are placed on the former bell tower of Palazzo Senatorio and on the facade of the same building, thus realizing Michelangelo's project, as documented by the engravings of Étienne Dupérac.
In the second half of the century the collections included the two statues of Julius Caesar and Navarch, the Capitoline Brutus and the Lex de imperio Vespasiani.
18th century
The museum was opened to the public at the request of Pope Clement XII in 1734, making it the oldest public museum in the world, understood as a place where art could be enjoyed by all and not only by the owners.
The enrichment of the collections resumed in the 18th century. In 1714 Pope Clement XI (1700–1721) donated to the museum five Egyptian statues found near the Porta Salaria. In 1733, under Pope Clement XII (1730–1740), the museum purchased the collection of Cardinal Alessandro Albani, including important pieces such as the Satyrs of the Valley, the Juno Cesi and a statue of Antinous found in Hadrian's Villa, but also a series of portraits preserved today in the Hall of Emperors and Philosophers.
The end of the eighteenth century was not favorable to the museum: the foundation of the Pio-Clementino museum in the Vatican Museums revived the competition between the municipal and papal collections. This caused an abrupt halt in the growth of the Capitoline archaeological collections: the attention of the pontiff was therefore entirely absorbed by this new museum. In 1797 Napoleon Bonaparte imposed the Treaty of Tolentino which provided for the transfer of some of the most famous pieces to the Louvre Museum. Antonio Canova, delegated by the Holy Father for the so-called "recoveries", remedied the Napoleonic spoliations through obstinacy (or more probably the clauses of the Congress of Vienna), reported in 1815 after the fall of Napoleon the Boy with Thorn, the Capitoline Brutus, the Dying Gaul and other works. Some, however, such as the Sarcophagus of the Muses, already in the museums of the Campidoglio through the Albani collection, remain in the Louvre.
19th and 20th century
Pope Gregory XVI assigned the administration of the museums to the Roman city authorities in 1838.
The transfer of the capital of the new Kingdom of Italy to Rome in 1870 and the events of the end of the century marked a fundamental stage in the life and development of the city that led to the transformation and expansion of the museums of the Campidoglio.
The collections were reorganized in 1903 by Rodolfo Lanciani according to more rigorous museographic criteria, further highlighting the archaeological context of the works. The works are distributed in the rooms according to their original context, favoring a more careful reading of the archaeological data rather than an inspirational vision more linked to the aesthetic value of the sculptures as masterpieces of ancient art.
Treaties of Rome of 1957
The Capitoline Museums and in particular the Palazzo dei Conservatori are remembered as the place where the Treaties of Rome were signed, which established the European Economic Community, the precursor of today's European Union. The six states that were already members of the European Coal and Steel Community took part in it, namely Belgium, France, West Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands, which, after the success of this latter treaty, decided to expand their cooperation agreements to other sectors. To this day, they are among the most important documents in the history of the European Union.
21st century
In 1997, a branch was opened in the former Centrale Montemartini, a former thermoelectric factory in the Ostiense district, creating an original solution of fusion between industrial and classical archaeology. Its rooms allow in particular to present the grandiose remains of the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus and the architectural complex of the temple of Apollo Sosianus with a monumental character.
In 2005, a new wing of the museum, called the Exedra of Marcus Aurelius, was added.
Today, the Capitoline Museums are part of the Civic Museums system of Rome. Finally, at the beginning of the 21st century, the "Grand Capitole" project led to the redevelopment of a large part of the Palazzo dei Conservatori.
In 2016, the museum enclosed several of its nude statues in white-colored wooden panels ahead of a meeting between Iranian president Hassan Rouhani and Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi that it hosted. The move was criticized by Italian Culture Minister Dario Franceschini as "incomprehensible," while the museum said that it had done so following a request from the prime minister's office, although Franceschini said that the government had not been informed of the matter in advance. Rouhani also denied asking Italian officials to cover up the artefacts but expressed his thanks to his hosts for making his visit "as pleasant as possible".
On 6 February 2024, a full-scale (1:1) reconstruction of the Colossus of Constantine was installed in the gardens of Villa Caffarelli. The reconstructed statue of Constantine the Great, approximately 13 m (42 ft 8 in) in height, was produced by the Factum Foundation for Digital Technology in Preservation, in collaboration with Fondazione Prada, based on technical analysis of the original fragments preserved in the courtyard of the Palazzo dei Conservatori supported by literary and epigraphic sources.
Collection
The Capitoline Collection is the oldest public collection in the world, covering an exhibition area of 12,997 m2 (139,900 sq ft).
Among the most famous sculptures kept in the Capitoline Museums is the Equestrian Statue of Marcus Aurelius, originally located in the center of Piazza del Campidoglio and transferred to the museums in 1990, in a specially set up glass room: the Exedra of Marcus Aurelius, which is located where the Roman Garden used to be, between Palazzo dei Conservatori and Palazzo Caffarelli. In the center of the square, in 1996, the statue of Marcus Aurelius was replaced by a copy, perfectly compliant in terms of volumes but not in terms of gilding.
There is also the symbol of the city, the bronze Capitoline Wolf, believed to be an Etruscan work from the 5th century BC; the original statue did not include the twins Romulus and Remus, added in the 15th century and attributed to the sculptor Antonio del Pollaiolo. Recently some restorers have hypothesized that the statue is not ancient, but medieval and that it dates back to the 12th century.
The Colossus of Constantine, visible in the courtyard, dates back to the 4th century. Other masterpieces of bronze sculpture are the Hercules of the Forum Boarium and the Boy with Thorn.
A masterpiece of medieval sculpture is the Portrait of Charles I of Anjou by Arnolfo di Cambio (1277), the first lifelike portrait of a living character sculpted in Europe that has reached us from the post-classical era.
Over time, other and numerous historical collections were exhibited here, such as the Protomoteca (collection of busts and herms of illustrious men transferred from the Pantheon to the Campidoglio by order of Pius VII in 1820); the collection of Cardinal Alessandro Albani; the one donated by Augusto Castellani in the second half of the 19th century, consisting of archaic ceramic materials (from the 8th century BC to the 4th century BC), mainly of Etruscan area, but also of Greek and Italic production.