UN LORICATO MEDICEO DAL COLLE QUIRINALE. DATI NUOVI E QUESTIONI APERTE

Abstract

An almost unstudied cuirassed torso from the Medici collections, which can be found today in the National Archaeological Museum of Florence, was placed in the Boboli Gardens in the mid-18th century, where it was fused with a pair of modern legs and a portrait of Augustus. Two centuries earlier, Giovannantonio Dosio had drawn it in Rome, in the vigna Ubaldini on the Quirinal hill – formerly owned by Cardinal Sadoleto – where Pirro Ligorio reported the exceptional discovery of this piece among many ‘marble images without heads’. This essay updates what we know about this family, and summarizes pre-existing studies on the location of the 16th-century vigna Sadoleto, where epigraphic documents on the domus of T. Flavius Sabinus and T. Pomponius Bassus were found. The inclusion in this debate of the torso in Florence reveals that the most impressive of the eight loricates – which was once also part of the Medici collections – is still missing.