From Rome to Ann Arbor

What would ever possess the cities of Ann Arbor Michigan and Rome Italy to ever collaborate on something? Rome is a city that will forever be associated with its extreme importance through history, and while Ann Arbor is a city that we all hold dear to our hearts, it’s hard to compare its importance to Rome! A few weeks ago while I was working in the Kelsey Museum, I was given a new project to begin cleaning some marble architectural fragments. When you spend a good amount of time with an object as I was doing with these marble fragments, you can’t help but be interested in their story. These pieces of marble, as I found out, had been returned to the Kelsey museum from Rome as they were being loaned for a special exhibit. I began my research by looking into the catalogue for the exhibit, and what I found out was pretty fascinating.

From 1900-1901, 15 fragments of Roman sculpture were discovered at the construction site for a new central railroad station in Rome (you can only imagine the crazy things they must find in Rome when they try to dig anywhere). Because it wasn’t an actual archaeological excavation, certain facts were not recorded that may have given clues about the objects recovered from the ground. Of the 15 fragments they found, 9 were sold to a German archaeologist and the other 6 were sold to Francis W. Kelsey (i.e. the “Kelsey” museum). Both the German archaeologist and Francis W. Kelsey were unaware of each other’s purchases. The significance of these objects was unknown, but the German archaeologist had his ideas (he ended up being right!), while the objects in the Kelsey museum remained unidentified for over 80 years.

In 1977 a graduate student here at Michigan was studying one of the fragments, which was a representation of the Roman emperor, Vespasian (the famous emperor responsible for the construction of the Coliseum). This particular fragment was also one of the two fragments I had been working on in the conservation lab.

(This is a picture I took while cleaning Vespasian's face. He wasn't too dirty... mostly just behind his ears!)

This graduate student proposed that it might come from the Templum Gentis Flaviae, which was the Flavian family sanctuary and supposedly served as the mausoleum of the three emperors of Rome’s second dynasty (AD 69-96). This was suggested because it was known that this monument was constructed on the particular site that it was found, and a representation of Vespasian would be expected for such a monument. At this point, the theory was merely speculation that lacked a lot of proof. A year later a student from UNC noticed that a fragment of a breastplate (the other object I was responsible for cleaning) fit perfectly with a fragment of a head in the collection in Rome that had been donated by the German archaeologist.

(Here is a picture of the breastplate fragment that I was working on. This is really the piece that put it all together!)

Upon realizing this, he also observed that the 9 pieces of marble in Rome shared many similarities to the collection of marble fragments in the Kelsey museum. He noticed that all the fragments shared a similar scale and ornamental detail, and also figured out that all of the marble was quarried from the same location near Athens. Upon realizing this, the student from UNC made the assertion that these separate collections are indeed one collection.

In 1986, the director of a museum in Rome suggested that there should be an exhibit that would reassemble these pieces for a singular exhibit, and that’s exactly what happened. (For more information about the exhibit click here) Now each museum has casts of each other’s fragments so that each can display the full collection. You can view the pieces in the Kelsey Museum on the second floor where they have created a model of what they think the actual mausoleum may have looked like one day. If these discoveries hold true, and they are actually fragments from Templum Gentis Flaviae, then the Kelsey Museum is displaying the earliest surviving sculptural decoration from a Roman imperial funerary complex!

Resource:

Gazda, Elaine K., and Anne E. Haeckl. Images of Empire: Flavian Fragments in Rome and Ann Arbor Rejoined. Ann Arbor, MI: Kelsey Museum of Archaeology, 1996. 5-10. Print.