What was it like to grow up in ancient Rome? A major museum is now addressing the question and investigating childhood in Roman times in a groundbreaking and innovative exhibition: A misura di bambino. Crescere nell’antica Roma, at Florence’s Uffizi. Thirty of the Roman statues in the former Medici collections, along with substantial loans from a few museums in Italy and abroad, are currently grouped together to examine a complex and still somewhat overlooked subject: that of human and divine childhood in the pre-Christian Roman world. The exhibition describes different moments of the everyday lives of children in the Roman empire: birth, rites of passage towards adulthood, school, play, and relationships with animals are all vividly documented through statues, sarcophagi, and common objects like toys. Captions and cartoons of some of the artefacts, thoughtfully on display at a lower height, allow children to look their peers from 2,000 years ago in the eye. Visitors to the Uffizi, striving to gaze at Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and the countless other famous paintings on show in the magnificent former Medici palace, rarely allow themselves enough leisure to also seek ancient Greek and Roman statuary in the same museum. Yet there was a time when the Uffizi Gallery was sought out by the connoisseurs on the Italian Grand Tour – the poet Shelley in 1819, for one – principally for the privilege of seeing, not Botticelli’s beautiful painted Venus, but, among other celebrated antiquities, a Venus in marble. This is the so-called ‘Medici Venus’, a 1st-century BC version of a bronze Greek original attributed to the great 4th-century BC sculptor Praxiteles, and a landmark of classical Western art history.
In fact, the Medici collection was originally, first and foremost, a collection of ancient sculpture. Such an assemblage was a must for any serious collector during the Renaissance. The Uffizi was built in the mid-16th century by the architect and art historian Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574) for Cosimo I de’ Medici (1519-1574), first Grand Duke of Tuscany, to house the offices of the city’s magistrates (uffici means ‘offices’ in Italian). Some rooms, however, were set aside on the third floor to display ‘with the most beautiful order’ the finest works of art from the duke’s collections, with antique sculpture taking pride of place. Almost two centuries later, thanks to the generosity of the last heir of the family, Anna Maria Luisa (1667-1743), the Medici treasures became permanent public property and the Uffizi a superlative museum. Cosimo I de’ Medici had continued his family’s collecting tradition when he became Duke of Florence in 1537, and even managed to repossess antiquities once owned by his great-grandfather Lorenzo il Magnifico some decades before. Gifts, chance discoveries, and acquisitions from Rome contributed to enrich his hoard of ancient works of art too.
It is from the wealth of this impressive collection that the exhibition curators have chosen a remarkable series of Roman works featuring children. Outstanding among them – for their variety and quality – are a group of superb marble portraits of heirs to power, the children of the rulers of the Roman empire. Most of these portraits, repaired over time with the addition of missing details as required, were inserted into 16th- and 17th-century busts of coloured marble to hold them upright and give them emphasis.
