Capitoline Museums – Hall of the Tapestries
From November 29th, 2024 to June 8th 2025
In the Hall of Tapestries in the Capitoline Museums in Rome, the portrait of Agrippa Postumus from the Fondazione Sorgente Group will be presented to the public for the first time. It is displayed in a dialogue with two other portraits of Agrippa: the first one from the Uffizi Gallery in Florence and the other from the Capitoline Collections.
The portraits of Agrippa Postumus take us back to the events of the history of the Roman Empire, when, after 4th A.D., and numerous bereavements due to the early deaths of Augustus’s designated successors, first Marcellus (son of Augustus’s sister Octavia) and then Lucius and Gaius Caesar (also Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa and Julia’s sons), the emperor was forced to revise his line of succession by adopting Tiberius Claudius Nero, son of his wife Livia from her first marriage, and Agrippa Postumus, the last of the five sons of Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, Augustus and his daughter Julia’s greatest collaborator. Although Agrippa Postumus was his only remaining nephew, Augustus repudiated him and had him exiled first to Sorrento and then to Pianosa, as ancient sources report, likely due to the power struggles that animated the court in the elderly princeps’s final years. The three sculptures on display represent the best preserved replicas of a type of portrait that critics attribute to Agrippa Postumus, dating between the adoption of the 4th and the condemnation of the 7th A.D., in the period in which Agrippa Postumus received honours and statuary dedications in Rome and in all the territories subject to the Empire.
The exhibition, curated by Laura Buccino, Eugenio La Rocca, and Valentina Nicolucci, is promoted by Roma Capitale, the Department of Culture, and the Capitoline Superintendency of Cultural Heritage, is organized by the Fondazione Sorgente Group and supported by the Sorgente Group and the Condotte 1880 Group.