April 29, 2012

• Museo Nazionale Romano

  Other than the Vatican Museums, there were only two other museums in Rome I planned to drag the family to visit. Why? this is the prevailing view on museums.

   

    

  I chose the Roman National Museum for two reasons. First, my guidebook gave it three stars (which is the highest). Second, it had a bunch of ancient Roman stuff, and that’s my favorite sort of thing to look at in museums. 

  When you look at a museum of Roman things, you would expect to see frescoes, mosaics, jewelry, marble statues, and coins. And we were not disappointed!  They had entire houses preserved to show us what the frescoes would have looked like in each room. (A fresco is a painting on wet plaster. It was like Roman wallpaper.)

  The reddsih-brown picture is one room in a house. I didn’t realize they covered their whole walls like that.

     

   

  Roman “carpet” was a mosaic. Many mosaic floors were black and white because those were the cheapest two colors of tiles. The mosaics we saw here were amazing! The more detailed the picture, the more colors, and the tinier the tiles, the more expensive a mosaic floor would be. The tiles in these mosaics were probably a centimeter square. So tiny!

                 

   

  I am not sure what you would call this piece. It was made of different colored marble and gorgeous, but it wasn’t made of little square tiles. It was all different shaped pieces for the bodies and capes and the border. You can’t really see it, but the background was a deep green, and the colors were vibrant.

  

   

  I saw this random, bronze arm. It was probably twice life-size. The information about it said that Romans often used hands and arms at the edges of decorative wall borders to fill in space at the ends. I guess it came in handy. HAHAHAHA. 

  

   

  What they did with marble was simply amazing. They could make a solid block of stone look like a flowing, transparent gown.

  

   

  And they could capture expression and motion so well. (Although many statues were listed as being “Roman copies of Greek originals.)

    

   

  They also did neat things with bronze. This is a famous statue called “The Boxer at Rest.” And it’s a Roman copy of a Greek original. That used to annoy me that these statues were just copies until I realized that a 2000 year old statue is still a 2000 year old statue, whether they copied someone else’s or not. 

     

   

  I enjoyed seeing all the different hairstyles on the busts. I imagined an ancient Roman beauty salon with all these heads in it and fashionable Roman women coming in to choose hairstyles. (This is just my imagination. I don’t know that this happened!)

   

                 

   

  Ancient Roman Barbie dolls? 

     

   

  They had some pretty jewelry, too. A lot of times when I see old jewelry in museums, I think, “Hmmm. Hope it looked a lot better when the person was wearing it.” But these pieces were still wearable today!

   

   

  There was a whole room full of coins. These were scales with weights. 

      

   

  James was excited to see a coin he had talked about in Sunday school. 

  

   

  Romans liked to use their coins not only to highlight the current emperor, but to show laws. This one shows the law of “Provoco” which meant that a Roman citizen could appeal punishments and rulings. It’s really neat when you see something in person you’ve only read about or seen pictures of.

  • 10:34 am
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