Grand Tour on Ancient Rome

George Loring Brown's Temple of Peace Painting and the Roman Forum's Most Misnamed Ruin

Fri, 25 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In 1864 the Boston painter George Loring Brown finished a landscape he called View of the Temple of Peace in the Roman Forum. It’s now in the Smithsonian American Art Museum: ruins near the Colosseum in warm light, with the dome of St Peter’s far off in the distance. It’s a lovely picture. The title is wrong.

The building everyone called the Temple of Peace for centuries was the Basilica of Maxentius. The real Temple of Peace was next door, and by Brown’s day there was hardly anything left of it to paint.

Piranesi's Altar to Apollo and the 18th-Century Business of Selling Ancient Rome

Fri, 25 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Cooper Hewitt, the Smithsonian’s design museum, has a late 18th-century watercolour of a Roman altar dedicated to Apollo. It’s carved all over with lion heads and lion feet, figures, fruit, ornament and, oddly, a crab. The caption says the altar came from the Villa di Cicerone, Cicero’s villa. The drawing is by an Italian draughtsman, Donato Vaselli, copying a print by Giovanni Battista Piranesi.

So this is a copy of a print of an object whose history came from Piranesi’s own caption. That chain is how a lot of Europe learned what ancient Rome looked like.

The Badminton Sarcophagus Was Carved While the Roman Empire Was Coming Apart

Mon, 21 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Forty human and animal figures, cut in high relief across seven feet of marble, with Dionysos riding a panther at the centre and the four Seasons standing around him as broad-shouldered young men rather than the women Roman art usually used for the job. One rounded end holds Mother Earth reclining with her attendants. The other has a river god and a pair of winged figures. Small Bacchic hangers-on fill every gap between the large figures, carved at reduced scale so the composition never breathes.