Torlonia marbles: ‘The priceless statues I saw covered in dust and dirt’on May 15, 2021 at 11:09 pm

For years a priceless sculpture collection lay hidden behind a door on the staircase leading to David Willey’s flat.

Many of the portrait busts have been identified as those of famous – and infamous – Roman emperors and their wives. Caracalla, for example (see above), and his barely teenage wife, Plautilla, who was murdered on her husband’s orders, and suffered the indignities of being declared a non-person. It was common practice in the ancient world to erase the names and images of a disgraced person from the public record – in Latin this was called Damnatio Memoriae.