The Colours of Antiquity: The Santarelli Marbles at the Capitoline Museums

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The Capitoline Museums, in the Palazzo Clementino, are currently hosting a comprehensive overview of the use of coloured marbles, from their origins up to the 20th century — a precious selection of over 660 polychrome marbles from the imperial age drawn from the Capitoline collection and the Dino and Ernesta Santarelli Foundation.

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Thanks to a ten-year free loan, the display offers a view of the immense quantity of stones imported to Rome: a unique opportunity to trace, through shapes, colours and patterns, the millennia-long history of the capital from an artistic as well as a socio-cultural, political and economic standpoint. The use of polychrome marbles was, in fact, a defining feature of Roman imperial architecture.

The display "The Colours of Antiquity. The Santarelli Marbles at the Capitoline Museums" is promoted by Roma Culture, the Capitoline Superintendence for Cultural Heritage and the Santarelli Foundation. Curated by Vittoria Bonifati, with scientific curation by Andrea G. De Marchi. Display design by Cookies (Alice Grégoire, Clément Périssé, Federico Martelli). Museum services by Zètema Progetto Cultura. Catalogue published by Treccani. The display unfolds across two rooms. The first exhibits 82 polychrome fragments from the Santarelli Foundation; the other houses two pairs of sample books, one from the early 19th century with 422 pieces (also from the Foundation), the other belonging to the Capitoline collection, begun in the second half of the 19th century by the Gui family and comprising 288 tiles.

The same room also features a head of Dionysus mounted on an unrelated female bust (composed of eight different marble types, along with a selection of marble-working tools from the Fiorentini workshop). A documentary, curated by Adriano Aymonino and Silvia Davoli, plays on loop, retracing the history of these materials as they arrived in Rome in connection with the empire's expansion policy. The display aims to tell the close connection between the presence of non-native materials in Rome and the political, economic and geographical expansion of the ancient Roman Empire, tracing territories and geographic networks through history and memory. Indeed, since the empire's great roads radiate from the centre of the ancient city, the placement of the marbles mirrors the cardinal directions from which they reached Rome. The result is an instructive visual impression, pointing to the civilisations most skilled in marble-working at the time of the Roman conquest.

The use of some coloured marbles dates back to the Neolithic or the late Bronze Age, such as the hard green serpentine. In Egypt, the pharaohs exploited different varieties, and their final dynasty, the Ptolemies (305–30 BC), expanded the repertoire with porphyries and alabasters, which were later prized in Rome. There, the rejection of luxury long prevailed, favouring ideas and materials drawn from tradition. The introduction of certain coloured marbles dates to the Republican period, such as giallo antico and pavonazzetto, while their widespread use is linked to the emperor Augustus. The greatest assortment of coloured marbles dates to the Flavians (AD 69–96). Many quarries became imperial under the Antonines, who expanded those beyond Italy. The colours were enlivened by polishing, oils or waxes and had to correlate with paintings and decorations, almost all of which have been lost. Extraction, working and transport required a vast, well-trained and disciplined workforce. It is possible that Augustus and his successors deliberately financed these activities in order to foster ethnic and social amalgamation across the empire's enormous extent, wanting to involve conquered peoples economically. The costs were comparable to military campaigns and must have had adequate motivations. But the reason is not entirely clear — it has been interpreted as a desire for luxury, for increased tax revenue, and for symbolic representation of the empire's extent.

The gradual military, political, administrative and economic dissolution of the West, corresponding to the Early Middle Ages, saw the closure of most quarries and, subsequently, a strong tendency toward the reuse of ancient materials. A new art developed, exploiting coloured marbles in original ways. Floors made of whole or broken reused slabs, forming geometric patterns, became widespread. The colours of certain ancient marbles echoed in Romanesque and Gothic architecture, in Tuscany and other regions — façades and bell towers striped in white and red (or green) imitated porphyry and serpentine, as 14th-century painting did even more precisely.

In the more organic revival of antiquity, the Renaissance, a contradictory and overlooked fact emerges: Rome's vivid colours were faded or reinvented. A change is owed to Raphael's maturity, in the Vatican Stanze, starting with the Room of the Fire (Incendio, 1514–1517), where several coloured stones are congruously painted. In the mid-16th century, Florentine marble inlay developed in Florence (from 1588 with the Opificio delle Pietre Dure), which seems reflected in Bronzino's style. Paintings on slate, and later on other stone types, also spread. Rome's vivid colours soon sparked a commonplace: they were deemed excessive, corrupting measured Greek simplicity. This idea recurs in art history, in judgements of Mannerism and Baroque as degenerations of Renaissance balance. In the early Renaissance, those colours must have been more visible than now, especially in marbles that had not undergone centuries of spoliation nor the effects of pollution. Yet many images of the city show them faded, up to Neoclassicism and beyond. Perhaps that "filter" served to make images referring to the past seem credible, since something similar is seen in cinematic flashbacks, often in black and white or with altered colours. These modifications may have helped turn the artistic image into a "time machine".