Audioguía Statuary collection Intro

The sculptural pieces are what remain of the finds and the pieces recovered, mainly around the area of the church of San Pancrazio, starting from the seventeenth century. The collection is made up of honorary statues and fragments of honorary statues: figures with togas, veiled female or draped male figures, fragments of statues dedicated to emperors or to young members of imperial families. Some figures represent deities: a torso of Artemis, a fragmentary statuette of Eros as a prisoner and a headless statue of a nymph, that came from the baths.

The production of funerary statues is characterised by the method of making the heads separately and then inserting them into an appropriate socket between the shoulders. The heads were not realistic portraits of the deceased, but instead they corresponded to the models and different types produced by the various stonemasons workshops.

All the Sestino statuary is made from blocks of lunense or Carrara marble and limestone from Piobbico in the Marche. Only one bronze statue is known of, the statue of the emperor Marcus Aurelius, of which only a foot still inserted into its base is preserved, now in the Antiquarium.

On the whole, based on stylistic data, the production of these statues can be dated to between the first imperial era and the second century CE.

Within this section there is also the life-sized reproduction of a funeral mausoleum, pertaining to the burial sepulchre of a rich Sestino family, various fragments of which were found in the early nineteen hundreds in the area of Travicello.

Another group of sculptural fragments of particular interest are represented by two sandstone bass-reliefs: one with a scene of “damnation to beasts” (condemned person killed by wild beasts), with a wild beast about to leap onto two defenceless figures and another with a circus scene with two young tumblers, a musician and a gladiator.