'Shattered visages': speaking statues from the ancient world

Apollo, July, 2003 by Verity Platt

The modern-day traveller to Rome, seeking peaceful shade away from the tumult of Piazza Navona, may stumble quite by accident upon a small, triangular space hidden behind Palazzo Braschi, within the district of Parione. Here, away from the baroque torrent of Bernini's Fountain of the four rivers, is to be found a sculpture which speaks with a far more strident voice. This is Pasquino, an eroded relic of ancient Rome who, animated by urban satirists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, has enjoyed a highly vocal 'afterlife' far removed from his original context and significance (Fig. 1). Forms of the word pasquinata have since entered most European languages, derived from the Roman tradition of affixing witty, scurrilous verses and epigrams to the base of the antique statue.

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Pasquino was set up in 1501 by Cardinal Oliviero Caraffa, close to the spot where the statue was discovered; in antiquity, it had probably adorned the Stadium of Domitian. Competing traditions tell how the statue gained its name: 'Pasquino' was possibly a local schoolmaster, whose pupils had for years used the sculpture as a stepping-stone to cross the muddy street next to their classroom, or he was a Parione tailor who--supplied with the latest Vatican gossip by his ecclesiastical clients--was particularly outspoken in his criticism of the papal court. (1) In fact, the tradition of the 'pasquinade' probably derives from a practice established by Cardinal Caraffa, whereby on the Feast of St Mark (25 April) each year, the statue was dressed up as a mythological figure, and Latin verses were attached to it 'in order to encourage the study of humane letters'. (2) By the mid-sixteenth century these poems had taken on a noticeably satirical nature, and were no longer confined to the Saint's day (Fig. 2). Indeed, the anti-papal tone of the pasquinate roused such hostility in the Vatican that Popes Leo X (1513-21) and Adrian VI (1522-23) temporarily banned the festival, the latter, apparently, desiring to throw Pasquino into the Tiber. (3)

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Pasquino, then, was the Private Eye or Canard Enchaine of renaissance and baroque Rome, whose subversive combination of critical observation and learned wit was formed by a multiplicity of anonymous voices, encompassing the contradictory elements of a vocal urban populace, yet always concerned with the political and ecclesiastical establishment. As the Italian historian Claudio Rendina has written, Pasquino 'speaks without respite with a voice which is simultaneously academic and amateur, clerical and antipapal, encomiastic and slanderous, politically committed and light-heartedly disengaged, decorous and foulmouthed, noble and, ultimately, plebeian.' (4) Leading a chorus of other 'speaking statues', such as the river-god Marforio, now in the courtyard of the Capitoline Museums (Fig. 3), an antique female bust nicknamed Madama Lucrezia in Piazza Venezia and the Babuino ('Baboon'), an aged satyr used as a fountain near Piazza del Popolo, Pasquino spoke for Rome itself. The voices of individual citizens thus united to speak through the very stones of their city, appropriating these markers of antiquity in order to comment upon the way in which institutional power was exercised over and against the ancient metropolis and its inhabitants.

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That Pasquino is intimately tied to the fabric of Rome is demonstrated by what is probably the most famous pasquinata, addressed to Pope Urban VIII (1623-44), a member of the powerful Barberini family, who had stripped the bronze girders from the roof of the Pantheon to make cannon for Castel S Angelo, and Bernini's Baldacchino in St Peter's:

Quod non fecerunt Barbari fecerunt Barberini What the Barbarians did not do, the Barberini did. (5)

Here Pasquino cries out against the desecration of the antique city from which he came, his very fragmentary and eroded status evidence of the centuries of destruction and neglect endured by the once magnificent Rome of the Caesars. The Barberini are represented as yet another wave of pillaging invaders, stripping the city of its wealth in order to further their own ends. Pasquino, as their critic, employs the elegant epigrammatic style of his imperial Roman contemporaries, expressing through his very language the civilised nature of the culture of which he, like the Pantheon, is a relic, subject to the destructive hand of the church and aristocracy.

But although Pasquino acts as a mouthpiece for the people and the physical infrastructure of Rome, who--or what--does he represent? How does the image itself relate to the texts which accompany it? For the sculpture's voice is so strong, so emphatic, that it seems to drown out the visual significance of the image itself. When people visit the Parione piazza, they come not to look, but to read. The lone voice of the anonymous character Pasquino is at odds with the actual sculpture, which represents not a single individual, like Marforio or Madama Lucrezia, but a mythological tableau comprising two large figures, which have survived as truncated torsoes and a severely eroded head; the observant viewer will notice that, ironically, this 'speaking statue' barely has a mouth.