“The
Museo Etrusco, founded in 1836 by Pope Gregory XVI was originally intended as
the depository for the numerous antiquities discovered since 1828…The side walls
of this room (VIII) are hung with copies of painting which decorated the
interior of a tomb-chamber at Vulci, discovered by Alexander Franciois in 1857.
And were afterwards removed to the Museo Trolonia alla Lungara at Rome… (He
describes our painting as; ) the grisly sacrifice offered by Achilles a the
funeral pyre of his friend Patroclus…Achilles in the presence of Agamemnon
thrusts his sword into the throat of a captive Trojan. The shade of Patroclus is also represented in
now way differentiated from the living, either in appearance or armor. Beside Patroclus is a female daemon with out
spread wings. Vanth; perhaps (an Etruscan)
goddess of death. While on the other
side of Achilles the Etruscan Charon;
Charus.
My question is whether we are looking at a photograph of the
copy, Helbig saw at Museo Geroriano Etrusco or the original sent to the Torlonia family in Rome? The website
for the Gregorian Etruscan Museum http://mv.vatican.va/3_EN/pages/MGE/MGE_Main.html makes no mention of this painting, nor does
the image the room currently designated by VIII show them hanging on the wall. And;
“Alessandro Torlonia, heir to Giovanni,
opened the collection to visitors in their family palace on Via
della Lungara, close to the Tiber
River, in 1893. In the 1960s, the museum was dismantled and the 77-room
palace was converted into a 93-unit apartment building. The
collection was put into storage and has not been publicly displayed. In May
2005 the family that owned the collection agreed to sell the collection to the
city of Rome”[ii]
So, what are we looking at and where is it?
[i] Guide
to the Public Collections of Classical Antiquities in Rome: by
Wolfgang Helbig, provided by Google Books
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