Spring

Alma-Tadema built a Roman street that never existed to celebrate a very Victorian moment. In his own London, children still went out on the first of May to gather flowers, and he wound that custom back into antiquity, staging a spring procession down marble steps banked with cheering crowds who toss blossoms from the balconies above. He worked on it for four years and packed it with real Roman things, inscriptions, silver, a statue, some copied from objects he had actually seen, so the fantasy would feel solid. No single ancient festival looked like this. He blended hints of several spring rites into one bright pageant of flowers and coloured marble. Robert von Mendelssohn, a German banker, bought it as soon as it was done in 1894.