A tiny Roman rarity cast near Vesuvius and once owned by the writer and politician Horace Walpole has been discovered by an eagle-eyed curator
A bronze bust of the “mad and bad” Roman emperor Caligula has been found 200 years after it disappeared – and 2,000 years since it was cast. It had been gifted in the mid-18th century to Horace Walpole, the writer, aesthete and Whig politician, who designed his own gothic home, Strawberry Hill, in Twickenham, south-west London.
Caligula – meaning “little boot”, a nickname given to him as a youngster – became the third Roman emperor in AD37, aged 24. He was widely regarded as a spendthrift and a sexual deviant; there were rumours of incestuous relationships with two of his older sisters. Caligula loved his horse Incitatus so much that he kept it in a marble stable and considered making it a consul. In the end, Caligula was murdered by his own Praetorian Guard after just four years as emperor.
Walpole was said to have been thrilled to have received the bust from Horace Mann, the British ambassador to. Mann claimed it had been rescued from the ruins of Herculaneum after the eruption of Vesuvius. “I had found some letters about the gift in our Strawberry Hill archive between Walpole, Mann and the Duke of Elbeuf, who did the Herculaneum excavation in the mid-18th century,” says Davoli. “That was my starting point.
But she had no idea where the bust itself was. After more digging Davoli discovered that, after Walpole’s death, it had been passed through his family before being bought by various collectors and then, in the 1890s, by Sir John Henry Schroder. But there was no invoice as proof of purchase or details of provenance. In fact, Schroders have long presumed it was a 15th-century bust of an unknown young man.
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