Aplicaciones y perspectivas de futuro

The sarcophagi panels in the façade of the Casino dell’Aurora, as with those in the courtyard of the Palazzo Mattei and the façade of the Villa Medici, began their lives as containers for deceased Romans in the second and third centuries. The biography of each sarcophagus panel varies considerably. Unfortunately, incomplete historical records leave little way of divining the specifics of the panels’ existences, though it is likely that each panel fulfilled various purposes in different stages of use and reuse until they reached the Casino dell’Aurora.126 We have seen sarcophagi reused for burials and as fountains in palatial gardens. At least two of the panels from the Casino dell’Aurora were displayed in Roman churches before Borghese purchased them towards the end of the sixteenth century.127 _{The reliefs in the façade of the} Casino dell’Aurora travelled over a millennium before reaching the current phase in their lives, architectural ornament.

It is in part because of their remarkable journey through time, and perhaps space, that late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century Roman elites, like Cardinal Borghese, found such value in the sarcophagi panels. As construction crews unearthed new fragments and renovated medieval buildings, sculptural pieces of Rome’s past entered the market as fashionable and

126 _{Arjun Appadurai, “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value,” in The Social Lives of Things:}

Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 17.

127 _{Bober and Rubinstein do not specify if these panels were set into the interior walls of churches, if they were on}

desirable art objects. Only elites able to marshal significant sums of money and navigate well- constructed client networks could procure such antiquities.128 _{A cardinal or nobleman without} enough funds or without knowledge of antiquities dealers, active construction sites, and ancient Roman topography would not be able to acquire appropriately fashionable antiquities. Indeed, at the Palazzo Mattei several of the inset fragments are not antique, but reproductions.129 _Others were augmented with restorations shortly before their incorporation into the palazzo’s courtyard walls. Koortbojian observes that such replication and modification indicate an eagerness for complete, unfragmented, ancient sculpture. Presenting his acquired sarcophagi panels as complete attests to Cardinal Borghese’s elevated social status and the range of his authority in his position as cardinal nephew.

Amassing a collection of well-preserved ancient sculptures is only the first step in the public display of one’s social status, wealth, and prestige. Display of antiquities within the palazzo or villa demonstrated the prominence of the collector, but only to esteemed guests – nobility, intellectual elites, and men of the Church – and household servants. 130 _{The antiquities} can be exhibited outside of the interior domestic space. We have seen free-standing statuary displayed in gardens, following the style of Imperial Roman villas, in the water theatre of the Villa Aldobrandini and in the courtyard of the Palazzo Mattei, and noted that interested individuals had enough access to tour the collections. Free-standing sculpture placed in close proximity to a domestic structure deeply tied to the prominence of a singular family – Borghese,

128 _{Weiss, 180.}

129 _{Koortbojian, “Renaissance Spolia and Renaissance Antiquity,” 151.}

130 _{Weiss notes that the Renaissance was a time when extravagant displays of wealth were acceptable and even}

endorsed as “tangible evidence of magnificence and the power that went with it.” This concept occurs most notably in ostentatious building practices. Weiss, 180.

Mattei, Aldobrandini – conveys the might of that particular family. Integration of the sculptures into the fabric of the structure itself amplifies this act exponentially.131 _{Unlike free-standing} sculpture, the sarcophagi panels and portrait busts made a part of the walls of buildings could not be easily moved or reconfigured. Unless deconstructed, the embedded collection stands as a permanent gesture towards the status and capabilities of the family within the network of elite Roman society.

Incorporated into the façade of the Casino dell’Aurora, the sarcophagi panels operate both as ornament and as deliberate reuse of ancient Roman iconography. The inclusion of the reliefs realizes the tension of the façade’s composition while advancing a particular image of their patron, Cardinal Borghese through their associations with the ancient past of Rome. Although the myths of the sculptural reliefs were well-known in the early-seventeenth century, the panels also operate in an ornamental mode because of their placement above the natural sightline of the viewer. At their current height, the highly energetic carvings of the sarcophagi appear to be abstracted into vegetal-like motifs. However, the panels do not shed their complex biographies; they continue to emblematize the ancient past of Rome. The visual abstraction of the iconography of the sarcophagi of the façade transforms the panels into symbols of a

generalized antiquity. The abstraction of form and of history observed in the façade of the Casino dell’Aurora coincide in a manner that demonstrates the prestige of their patron, Cardinal

Borghese, to a public audience.

131 _{Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility (Third Version),” in Walter}

Benjamin: Selected Writings, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott, vol. 4: 1938- 1940 (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), 268.

FIGURES

Figure 2. A view showing the multiple registers of embedded ancient materials and free-standing sculptures in the courtyard of the Palazzo Mattei di Giove, Rome, 1598-1617.

Figure 4. Partial view of the façade of the Casino of Pius IV demonstrating Ligorio’s inclusion of classical elements, Rome, 1562.

Figure 5. The water theatre at the Villa Aldobrandini, Frascati, 155-1623.

Figure 9. Staircase within the hanging gardens of the Palazzo Pallavicini-Rospigliosi, Rome, 1611-1616.

Figure 10. Sarcophagi panels in the façade of the Casino dell’Aurora, in present sequence – Endymion, Bacchanal Scene, Meleager, Lion Hunt, marble, second to third century CE.

Figure 11. Sarcophagus with Hippolytus and Phaedra, marble, Camposanto, Pisa, late second century CE.

Figure 12. Sarcophagus of Meleager reused as a fountain trough at Madinat al-Zahra’, marble, Cordoba, third century CE.

Figure 13. Sarcophagus reused as fountain trough at the Palazzo Aldobrandini, now lost, Rome, late second century CE.

Figure 15. The ceiling of the Piccolomini Library in the Siena Cathedral, Bernadino di Giago, known as Pinturicchio, Siena, 1501-1506.