The Corsini Throne

Between 1732 and 1734 workmen were digging the foundations for a new chapel in San Giovanni in Laterano, the cathedral of Rome. The pope was a Corsini, Clement XII, and the chapel was for his family. In the ground they found this round marble chair.

Its carving is laid out in bands. On the back, inside a frame of ivy, a line of soldiers fills the upper register and men hunt wild boar below. Around the base, above a band of plants, runs the main frieze, with scenes of sacrifice, of combat and of a procession that scholars still find hard to interpret.

The type is Etruscan. Etruscan funerary thrones like this were made mostly of bronze or terracotta, and the museum takes this one as a faithful copy, carved in the late Republic, of an Etruscan princely throne from the end of the 5th century BC. The marble and the place where it was found make it Roman. One suggestion is that it was made for Urgulania, a woman of Etruscan descent who married into the Plautii, a powerful Roman family, around 40 BC, as a sign of her royal ancestry.