The Capitoline Wolf: The Bronze Behind Rome's Founding Myth

According to Roman tradition, King Numitor of Alba Longa was overthrown by his brother Amulius, who ordered Numitor's infant grandsons, Romulus and Remus, thrown into the Tiber to remove any future rivals. The river carried the twins to safety near the Palatine Hill, where a she-wolf found them and nursed them at a cave later known as the Lupercal.

A shepherd named Faustulus discovered the twins and raised them as his own. Once grown, Romulus and Remus overthrew Amulius, restored Numitor, and set out to found a city of their own on the site where the wolf had saved them, an origin story Romans were still retelling, in coins and sculpture, centuries later.

The bronze wolf nursing two human infants became the single image that carried this story forward, regardless of when any specific statue of it was actually cast.

Ancient writers give us reason to think a bronze wolf stood on the Capitoline Hill long before the one on display today. Cicero wrote that a gilded statue of the she-wolf nursing the twins was struck by lightning in 65 BC, and for centuries, historians assumed the surviving bronze was that very statue, pointing to damage on one of its paws as proof.

Radiocarbon testing at the University of Salento in 2007, confirmed by thermoluminescence analysis in 2021, dated the bronze to somewhere between 1021 and 1153 AD, roughly a thousand years too late to be Cicero's wolf. The paw damage, it turns out, more likely came from a flaw in the medieval casting process rather than a lightning strike.

That leaves the original, lightning-struck wolf lost to history, and the statue in the museum today as a medieval successor to it, made by hands whose names nobody recorded. An older theory crediting the piece to the Etruscan sculptor Vulca of Veii has been abandoned along with the ancient dating.

The wolf, it turns out, wasn't always shown with Romulus and Remus. The two suckling infants beneath her were cast separately and added to the composition around 1471, most likely by the Florentine sculptor Antonio del Pollaiuolo.

That date isn't a coincidence: 1471 is the same year Pope Sixtus IV donated the wolf, along with the Spinario and fragments of a colossal bronze statue of Constantine, to the people of Rome, the gift now credited with founding the Capitoline Museums. Adding the twins at that moment turned a standalone animal bronze into an unmistakable symbol of the city's own foundation story, right as it went on public display for the first time.