Nude gods hidden by nuns for 300 years return to view in Rome villa
Restorers in Rome have uncovered 16th-century wall paintings of naked gods, soldiers and star signs that were painted over by nuns and hidden for 300 years.
The paintings are inside the Villa Silvestri Rivaldi on Via dei Fori Imperiali in Rome, the broad road that leads down to the Colosseum. In the 1500s it was counted among the city’s grandest private homes, according to The Art Newspaper.
The villa was built in the mid-16th century by Eurialo Silvestri, a wealthy church official and right-hand man to Pope Paul III. Silvestri built big to help his push to be made a cardinal. The push failed.
The house later passed to the man who would become Pope Leo XI. From 1660 it belonged to the Conservatory of the Mendicant Spinsters, a religious body that ran a girls’ school and an orphanage there. The second half of the name, Rivaldi, comes from a bequest to the nuns by Monsignor Ascanio Rivaldi.
The nuns held the villa for 300 years and left around 1970. During that time the building had many lives, including a spell as one of Rome’s leading textile workshops.
The nuns also covered the murals. The images showed nude figures from non-Christian mythology, stories of ancient gods rather than the Bible, and the sisters found them offensive. Layer upon layer of paint and plaster went on top.
What has come back into view is bright and busy. Conservators have found battle scenes with soldiers, gatherings of gods and goddesses, and symbols of the zodiac, the twelve star signs. The wider cycle is said to tell two stories at once, the pagan history of Rome and the glory of the Church, as reported by Artnet News.
The gardens were just as showy. They held a nymphaeum, an ornate garden house built around water, with 12 fountains, alcoves lined with shell mosaics and statues, and orange trees.
Uncovering the work has been slow. Between 2002 and 2006, restorers carried out small cleaning tests to pare back the overpaint on the walls of the main floor. That careful sampling told them how much survived underneath.
The full job is now part of a €35 million ($41.1 million) restoration of the villa. Paola Mezzadri, a conservator and restorer at the Istituto Centrale per il Restauro in Rome, Italy’s central conservation institute, is one of the research leaders on the project.
What makes this stand out is how ordinary the cover-up was. No fire. No theft. Just paint, applied for modesty, doing its job for three centuries. A short walk from the crowds heading to the Colosseum, a cardinal’s failed gamble is getting its colours back.
