Want to watch the sixth and final season of The Crown at an estate that has the royal stamp of approval from the British monarchy? Whether you’re looking to vacation like King Charles III or unwind like Queen Elizabeth II, here are a handful of stunning royalty-approved UK properties that any commoner can book.
A crumbling, long-forgotten statue with an unusual erect phallus might be a Michelangelo. Renaissance scholars want hard evidence.
15.10.2023 - 13:09 / insider.com
Some 400 years ago, Cardinal Ludovico Ludovisi — whose family would produce two popes, more than a dozen cardinals, and a smattering of statesmen — bought what became known as the Villa Aurora from Italy's Orsini family. A sprawling estate on the outskirts of Rome, it included an art collection that drew admirers from across Europe and, most notably, Caravaggio's only ceiling mural.
In a place of honor was a life-size marble statue of the Greek god Pan with a wicked expression, a forked beard, and an 8-inch erect penis leaning left. The cardinal, it appears, built a pillared shrine for it between two majestic cypress trees.
Over the centuries, new research has found, the Ludovisi family's attitude toward the marble god changed. A satyr with an ugly grimace and an imposing phallus? What would the neighbors think?
By 1885, a sculpted fig leaf covering the uncircumcised penis had disappeared. A row of hedges was planted in front of the statue, allowing it to recede out of view.
Sometime in the second half of the 20th century, the hedges were gone and a tree was planted in front of the statue. Artists and scholars continued to copy and study the works of the villa, but the statue left the public record for a century, not drawn or photographed between 1885 and 1985. Pan, the Greek god of woodlands and lust, was left to waste away behind a tree.
When Corey Brennan, a classics professor at Rutgers University, visited the property for the first time, in spring 2010, he didn't know what to do with the statue. The villa's steward at the time, Princess Rita Jenrette Boncompagni Ludovisi, had cleared away the tree a couple of years earlier and brought the sculpture back into public view.
She said the statue was created by Michelangelo Buonarroti, the Renaissance master who painted the Sistine Chapel and etched David out of marble before his 1564 death. She learned this from her husband, Nicolò, who heard it from his grandfather Francesco Boncompagni Ludovisi, whose "depth of historical information, handed down from generation to generation, always is proven to be historically correct and consistent," Princess Rita told Insider.
The statue's provenance was widely accepted by the 1730s, but a group of German scholars in the 19th century had cast doubt on the attribution. When, in July 2022, a student of Brennan's, Hatice Çam, said she was a Michelangelo fanatic, he turned the question over to her.
"See what you can do with it," he recalled telling her.
Çam took on the assignment with relish. Digging into the estate's archives and other historical documents, she found centuries-old private sketches of the statue and correspondences and journal entries describing it.
Over time, the elements had beaten the statue,
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