A 1930 photograph of one of the two Roman ships recovered from Lake Nemi.
Posted on 03/16/2021 10:17:01 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
A 2,000-year-old artifact that had ended up in the home of a Manhattan antiquities dealer is now in an Italian museum.
...It was crafted in the first century for the deck of one of two spectacularly decorated ships on Lake Nemi that the Emperor Caligula commissioned as floating palaces. Recovered from underwater wreckage in 1895, the mosaic was later lost for decades, only to re-emerge several years ago as a coffee table in the living room of a Manhattan antiques dealer...
Caligula’s rule only lasted from A.D. 37 to 41, but he enthusiastically embraced the trappings of the position, including an opulent residential compound on the Esquiline Hill in Rome, a villa on the southwest shore of Lake Nemi and the two ships.
Scholars are still unsure whether the ships had a specific purpose, though some have posited that one was used for the worship of the Egyptian goddess Isis. In any case, Caligula didn’t skimp on the ships’ décor, which included mosaics on the walls, intricately inlaid marble floors, decorated fountains and marble columns. Bronze figures decorated the beams, headboards and other wooden parts...With Caligula’s death, the ships were destroyed and sank to the bottom of the lake. Various attempts to raise them over the centuries were unsuccessful, as well as damaging, and the wrecks were repeatedly plundered, Ms. De Angelis said.
In 1895, the antiquarian Eliseo Borghi managed to recover part of the ship’s decorative bounty, including some of the bronze decorations and parts of the marble floor. These items — including the recently returned mosaic, which he had restored using fragments of ancient marble integrated with modern pieces — were sold to museums in Italy and elsewhere in Europe, as well as to private collectors.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
That must have been some coffee table!
That’s a bigger boat!....................
Can’t read without a subscription.......sounds interesting tho
Saw one of those in a thrift shop for 20 bucks.
LOL...you never know what you are going to find! :-)
I brought it for 10.
Sad to think these ships were burned purely out of spite as the Germans retreated.
Caligula himself is going to return if the Democrats continue to get their way.
Not very impressive. A 6th grader could make a replica of it.
Who’d want something such a monster owned in their home?
If it had been found by muzzies, they’d have smashed every bit of it, which would make some people happy.
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