Smithsonian 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.

Half of This Roman Mosaic Glass Bowl Is Plaster, and the Smithsonian Kept It

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

The Smithsonian American Art Museum owns a Roman mosaic glass bowl made sometime between the 1st century BCE and the 1st century CE. It’s about 17 centimetres wide, patterned in translucent blue and opaque glass, with a marbled ring for a foot. When conservators studied it closely they found that roughly half of it isn’t glass at all. It’s plaster, painted to look like the missing pieces.

They decided to leave the plaster where it was.

Julius Caesar's 44 BCE Denarius: The Coin That Helped Get Him Killed

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

The silver coin in the Smithsonian’s National Numismatic Collection is small, about 19 millimetres across, and it carries the face of a man who had weeks to live. On one side is Julius Caesar, head turned to the right. On the other is Venus, holding a small figure of Victory in one hand and a sceptre in the other. It was struck in Rome in 44 BCE.

That doesn’t sound radical. Rulers put their faces on money all the time. But Romans didn’t, and that’s the whole point.

Juno Moneta: How a Roman Goddess Gave Us the Words Money and Mint

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

Every time you say “money” you’re saying the name of a Roman goddess. Juno Moneta had a temple on the Capitoline Hill, the Romans made their coins next to it, and her title ended up attached to the coins themselves. A silver denarius from 46 BCE in the Smithsonian’s National Numismatic Collection shows her face.

The funny part is that Moneta had nothing to do with money to begin with.

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.