Capitoline Museums: Inside the World's First Public Museum

For centuries, this bronze wolf was dated to the 5th century BC and credited to Etruscan hands. Radiocarbon testing in 2007, backed up by further analysis in 2021, showed it was actually cast sometime between the 8th and 14th centuries, a medieval work rather than an ancient one. The twin infants suckling beneath her, Romulus and Remus, were added around 1471, probably by the sculptor Antonio del Pollaiuolo, the same year Sixtus IV brought the statue here.

This bronze is the only large equestrian statue of a Roman emperor to survive from antiquity, and it likely owes that survival to mistaken identity: medieval Romans believed it showed Constantine, the first Christian emperor, so it escaped being melted down like most pagan bronzes were. Michelangelo placed it at the center of his redesigned piazza in 1538. The original was moved indoors in 1990 to protect it from pollution, and a replica now stands outside in its place.

Only a handful of fragments remain of this seated statue, once around 12 meters tall inside the Basilica of Maxentius in the Roman Forum: a head, a hand, a foot, and a few other pieces, carved in marble with the rest of the body built from brick and wood. The hand alone stands taller than most visitors.

Before the she-wolf, this Hellenistic marble group was Rome's civic emblem. Carved in the late 4th century BC and brought to Rome as war spoils, it stood by the 14th century on the Palazzo Senatorio's staircase, where death sentences were pronounced in its presence. Sixtus IV's 1471 gift of the wolf effectively replaced it as the symbol of the city, and it now sits inside the museum instead.

This marble figure of a wounded warrior is a Roman copy of a lost Greek bronze original from the 3rd century BC, acquired in 1734 as part of the Albani collection that helped launch the museum's public era. For generations it was misread as a dying gladiator, a mistake repeated by poets and painters long before art historians corrected it.

Discovered in the 1670s and purchased for the collection by Pope Benedict XIV in 1752, this marble figure follows the modest Venus Pudica pose found across Roman and Greek sculpture, one of several ancient Venus types the Capitoline collection preserves.

The two main palaces sit directly on top of the Tabularium, ancient Rome's public record office, built in 78 BC to store the city's official archives. Its surviving arches now form part of the route between the museum's two wings, and the corridor running through them opens onto the museum's best view: the Roman Forum and Palatine Hill spread out below.