An emperor without armour
Marcus Aurelius ruled from 161 to 180 CE and spent much of his reign fighting on the Danube frontier. He is also remembered as a philosopher: his private notes, known as the Meditations, are still read today. The statue, more than four metres high, was probably made around 175, perhaps for a victory or a triumph.
He wears a tunic and a general’s cloak, but no armour, no helmet and no weapon. He rides without stirrups, which the Romans did not use. His face is bearded, in the style Hadrian had made fashionable, and calm. The horse, by contrast, is all movement: one foreleg raised, the head turned, the mouth open.
What the gesture means
The emperor stretches his right arm forward with the palm turned down. Romans knew this as the gesture of a commander speaking to his troops, called adlocutio, the same raised arm seen on statues and coins of emperors since Augustus. It can also be read as clemency: the victor sparing the defeated. Medieval writers described a small figure of a barbarian under the raised hoof, now lost; if it was there, the message was power and mercy together.
Saved by a mistake
Rome once had many statues of emperors on horseback, in bronze. Almost all were melted down for their metal, the fate of most ancient bronzes. This one stood for centuries near the Lateran, the pope’s residence. According to tradition, it survived because Romans believed the rider was Constantine, the emperor who had favoured Christianity, and nobody wanted to destroy him. Medieval guidebooks to Rome tell other stories about the rider too, which shows that his real name had been forgotten.
Small areas of the original gilding still shine on the bronze. The whole statue was once covered in gold leaf.
Michelangelo’s square
In 1538 Pope Paul III had the statue moved to the Capitoline Hill, where Michelangelo was redesigning the square. Michelangelo made its pedestal, and the whole Piazza del Campidoglio, with its oval star-patterned pavement, was planned around the bronze horseman. The design is on the Italian 50-cent euro coin.
The statue also became a model. Renaissance sculptors studied it when they revived the bronze equestrian monument, and Donatello’s statue of the condottiere Gattamelata in Padua, finished in 1453, is thought to owe much to it.
Indoors since the 1980s
Air pollution was damaging the bronze, and in 1981 the statue was taken down for restoration. Since 1997 a copy has stood in the square, and the original is shown indoors in the Capitoline Museums, in a glass-roofed hall built for it. A panel from a lost monument of the same emperor, with Marcus Aurelius addressing his troops, survives in another place: it was reused on the Arch of Constantine, with his face recut.
Where to see it
The original is in the Exedra of Marcus Aurelius in the Palazzo dei Conservatori, part of the Capitoline Museums on the Capitoline Hill. The copy stands in the centre of Piazza del Campidoglio, open to all.
Sources
- Musei Capitolini, “Statua equestre di Marco Aurelio”.
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Marcus Aurelius” and “Equestrian statue”.
- P. Stewart, Statues in Roman Society (Oxford, 2003).
