Marforio

From the early 1500s, anonymous verses mocking popes and cardinals were pasted up at night on a battered ancient statue near Piazza Navona that Romans called Pasquino. Soon this reclining giant, then lying at the edge of the Forum, became his partner. People called him Marforio, perhaps from Martis Forum, the forum of Mars, near which he was said to have been found, and in many lampoons the two held a conversation, Marforio asking and Pasquino answering. Under Clement XI, a pope from Urbino, Marforio asked Pasquino what he was doing, and Pasquino replied that he was keeping watch over Rome so that it would not be carried off to Urbino. The museum counts six such talking statues in the city.

The figure itself is a 1st-century river god with a heavy beard and a cloak over his legs. He has no attribute that names the river, so scholars have suggested the Rhine, the Nile or the Tiber, while the museum thinks Oceanus more likely. He lay by the church of Santi Luca e Martina until 1592, and now reclines in the great fountain at the back of this courtyard.