May 23, 2024 #news
The mystery of the Roman Knight. And a question that bounces from the Casina dell’Orologio to the walls of the Ancient Tribunes of the Oval: what if that armored knight in the bas-relief restored thanks to the Piazza di Siena Competition was the emperor Trajan? And that is the man who was the protagonist of the maximum expansion of the Roman empire? The story is beautiful and compelling and takes on the contours of a historical fiction, complete with a ‘mystery’ about the identity of the main character.
The marble sculpture of great value – we are around 14 quintals in total – exhibited in the Casino dell’Orologio at Villa Borghese, is known, precisely, as: “The Knight’s Relief”, a work that belongs to the seventeenth-century nucleus of the Borghese Collection and represents a young knight with scale armor and boots decorated with lions – lion heads typical of military decorations of the time – holding the reins of a horse in his right hand.
The high quality, the notable dimensions of the relief (almost two meters high, 1.60 meters wide), the type of armor generally worn by high-ranking soldiers, the rich harness of the horse complete with flanks decorated with two facing panthers, have led to the hypothesis that, at least, it could be a high exponent of the emperor’s personal Cavalry (Equites singulares Augusti) and that the work can be traced back to the Trajan-Hadrian age (first half of the 2nd century AD). And yet precisely that rich style in the harness and details of the Knight does not exclude the most suggestive hypothesis, namely that the man who was probably holding a dagger, the Roman short sword, in his left hand could really be the emperor Trajan.
The work, composed of eleven fragments before the extraordinary reconstruction work and ‘dormant’ in a warehouse since 1989, was restored thanks to the collaboration between the organizers of the Piazza di Siena Competition, FISE (Italian Federation of Equestrian Sports and Sports and Health ) and Rome Capital – Capitoline Superintendence of Cultural Heritage, with an element that contributes to deepening the mystery of the ‘Knight-Emperor’: the head of the bas-relief facing the horse, although ancient, ‘is not relevant’, explain the scholars. And that is not his: it is probable that the original head was covered by a helmet, while the practice of using other parts of sculptures in case of breakages or losses was quite common in ‘repairs’ in Roman times.
Today, during the presentation of a Rolex event – main sponsor of the Piazza di Siena Competition – inside the Casino dell’Orologio, the ‘Rilievo del Cavaliere’ made its first public ‘outing’ among VIPs and journalists, making it contagious that mystery: what if Emperor Trajan was really the Mysterious Knight?
© Kmoving Press Release and photos
