Location | Campus Martius |
---|---|
Coordinates | 41°53′50″N12°28′45″E / 41.8972°N 12.4791°E |
Type | Statue |
History | |
Founded | 1st or 2nd century CE |
The Statue of the Tiber river with Romulus and Remus is a large statue from ancient Rome exhibited at the Louvre museum in Paris, France. It is an allegory of the Tiber river that waters the city of Rome.
The Tiber is depicted as a middle-aged man, bearded and reclining, according to the typical pattern for representations of river gods. In his hands, he holds the attributes that signify the benefits he bestows on Rome:
Under the right arm of the god lies the she-wolf which, according to legend, suckled the twins Romulus and Remus who had been abandoned in the Tiber and would later go on to found the city of Rome.
The base of the statue is decorated with reliefs depicting a scene of grazed fields, one of boatmen, and another relating to the tale of Aeneas.
The statue is 3.17 m wide, 2.22 m tall, and 1.31 m deep. [1] It is carved from marble taken from Mount Pentelicus near Athens, Greece. [1]
The statue was discovered in 1512 in Rome at the site of the Temple of Isis and Serapis, near the present-day basilica of Santa Maria sopra Minerva. [2] The statue undoubtedly decorated a fountain situated on the path leading to the sanctuary. It mirrored a statue of the Nile river (now preserved in the Vatican) in which Romulus and Remus are replaced by a crowd of children representing pygmies.
After their discovery, the two statues were initially preserved in the papal collections. Following the Treaty of Tolentino (1797) between the French Republic and the Papal States, they were transferred to the Louvre, where their presence was attested in 1811. In 1815, after the defeat of Napoleon, the statue of the Nile was returned to the Vatican. However, the statue of the Tiber was offered by the pope Pius VII to the French king Louis XVIII and remained in the Louvre.
The image of the statue of the Tiber was widely circulated and it became the subject of numerous marble or bronze replicas.
The date of the sculpture is uncertain. It was probably installed after the fire at the Temple of Isis in 80 CE. But it could be from the later Hadrian period (117–138 CE).
Gian LorenzoBernini was an Italian sculptor and architect. While a major figure in the world of architecture, he was more prominently the leading sculptor of his age, credited with creating the Baroque style of sculpture.
Isis was a major goddess in ancient Egyptian religion whose worship spread throughout the Greco-Roman world. Isis was first mentioned in the Old Kingdom as one of the main characters of the Osiris myth, in which she resurrects her slain brother and husband, the divine king Osiris, and produces and protects his heir, Horus. She was believed to help the dead enter the afterlife as she had helped Osiris, and she was considered the divine mother of the pharaoh, who was likened to Horus. Her maternal aid was invoked in healing spells to benefit ordinary people. Originally, she played a limited role in royal rituals and temple rites, although she was more prominent in funerary practices and magical texts. She was usually portrayed in art as a human woman wearing a throne-like hieroglyph on her head. During the New Kingdom, as she took on traits that originally belonged to Hathor, the preeminent goddess of earlier times, Isis was portrayed wearing Hathor's headdress: a sun disk between the horns of a cow.
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J. Le Gall, « Les Bas-reliefs de la statue du Tibre », in Revue archéologique, 1944.