Discovery
It is thought to have been rediscovered in the early 17th century during some excavations for the foundations of the Villa Ludovisi and was first recorded in a 1623 inventory of the collections of the powerful Ludovisi family of Rome. The villa was built in the area of the ancient Gardens of Sallust where, when the Ludovisi property was built over in the late nineteenth century, many other antiquities were discovered, most notably the "Ludovisi Throne". By 1633 it was in the Ludovisi Palazzo Grande on the Pincio. Pope Clement XII acquired it for the Capitoline collections. As one of the most famous Roman antiquities, it was then taken by Napoleon's forces under the terms of the Treaty of Tolentino, and displayed with other Italian works of art in the Louvre Museum until 1816, when it was returned to Rome.
Read more about this topic: Dying Gaul
Famous quotes containing the word discovery:
“The virtues of society are vices of the saint. The terror of reform is the discovery that we must cast away our virtues, or what we have always esteemed such, into the same pit that has consumed our grosser vices.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Your discovery of the contradiction caused me the greatest surprise and, I would almost say, consternation, since it has shaken the basis on which I intended to build my arithmetic.... It is all the more serious since, with the loss of my rule V, not only the foundations of my arithmetic, but also the sole possible foundations of arithmetic seem to vanish.”
—Gottlob Frege (1848–1925)
“I have known no experience more distressing than the discovery that Negroes didn’t love me. Unutterable loneliness claimed me. I felt without roots, like a man without a country ...”
—Sarah Patton Boyle, U.S. civil rights activist and author. The Desegregated Heart, part 1, ch. 10 (1962)