Historic Rome reached its apogee below Trajan, emperor from AD98 to AD117. The empire would by no means be bigger than when he died, aged 63, and his rise from humble Spanish origins to a reign marked by army triumphs and civic beneficence gave Rome what we would now name a rebranding. Trajan’s story, and his period’s inventive legacy, will attain the US this month, when the Museum of Fantastic Arts, Houston opens Artwork and Life in Imperial Rome: Trajan and His Instances.
The genesis of the exhibition dates to 2021, when StArt, an Italian museum consultancy, approached Houston with the thought, says the museum’s longtime director Gary Tinterow. StArt negotiated the loans, he says, which draw extravagantly on a number of of Italy’s most necessary antiquities collections, together with the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli (Mann), and the Vatican Museums.
Standout Mann works coming to Texas embrace a 2m-tall marble statue of Trajan, relationship to the early second century. One other oversize statue, of Sabina, the spouse of Trajan’s successor Hadrian, is arriving from the archaeological park at Ostia Antica. The work, displaying Sabina dressed because the goddess Ceres, has by no means been loaned outdoors Italy, says the present’s in-house curator, Danielle Smotherman Bennett.
No extra massive wigs
The artwork and objects of Trajan’s reign, Bennett says, have distinct traits, together with “easier traces” and default depictions of the emperor dressed as a soldier reasonably than a deity or a patrician. Depictions of girls additionally differed, she provides, citing the colossal portrait of Plotina, Trajan’s spouse, on mortgage from the Vatican’s Museo Pio-Clementino. The determine’s hair, she says, has a much less adorned fashion than “these massive wigs with elaborate curls” that marked earlier depictions of girls.
The present will journey in March 2026 to the Saint Louis Museum of Artwork, which is loaning, amongst different works, a Corinthian capital to the Houston present. US-based loans are coming from the J. Paul Getty Museum, Houston’s Menil Assortment and a non-public Texas collector, who’s contributing a Sixteenth-century hand-coloured engraving of a map displaying historic landmarks nonetheless seen on the time.
The Houston and St. Louis variations will cowl completely different floor. The Texas museum’s galleries can accommodate gigantic objects—similar to a recreation of a 3.6m part of Trajan’s Column—which is not going to journey. Whereas in St. Louis, smaller galleries will go into extra element about Ostia, Historic Rome’s harbour, which Trajan expanded throughout his reign. Each exhibits will recall the emperor’s civic works, such because the grand rebuilding of the Circus Maximus, the location of Rome’s chariot races, which dwarfed the Colosseum. A funerary monument, on mortgage from the Vatican, depicts a chariot race.
Historic Rome has grow to be an unlikely meme within the US, with TikTok references to the Empire attracting views by the billion. Discerning museumgoers will little doubt come to admire the discreet class of uncommon objects, such because the group of greyhounds that adorned the villa of Emperor Antoninus Pius, who reigned a technology after Trajan. However Tinterow is intent on attracting a wider viewers, drawn, because the meme suggests, by Historic Rome’s macho gravitas. “I hope all these individuals will come,” he says.
• Artwork and Life in Imperial Rome: Trajan and His Instances, Museum of Fantastic Arts, Houston, 2 November-25 January 2026
