Why are the Noses of Ancient Statues Broken?

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This video is sponsored by Wondrium.

One warm summer evening, as sunset gilded the crosses and cupolas of central Rome, I

spent an hour exploring the Vatican’s Chiaramonti Museum.

The museum consists of a single vaulted corridor, lined by hundreds of Roman statues.

Emperors stand with philosophers, merchants beside matrons, soldiers by freed slaves.

Despite their variety, I noticed, virtually all of these statues had one thing in common:

their noses had been broken.

Statues were indispensable ornaments of the classical city.

They stood sentry over tombs, gazed down from the galleries of theaters, and garnished the

gardens and villas of the rich.

Each temple was centered on a magnificent likeness of its indwelling deity; every sanctuary

shone with portraits of worshippers and gods.

Busts of the emperors presided in courtrooms, and petrified dignitaries crowded the boulevards,

their pedestals proclaiming services to city and state, their ranks multiplying with the

centuries.

By late antiquity, the city of Rome boasted nearly four thousand bronze statues, and as

many marble statues – it was said – as living men.

Although classical sculptors employed many materials – some temples, for example, sheltered

images carved from wood or hewn from meteorites, while others gloried in gods of gold and ivory

– most freestanding statues were made of bronze or marble.

The tensile strength of bronze made possible both the dynamic poses favored by the Classical

era’s greatest sculptors and the vast scale of the Colossus of Rhodes, which was roughly

the size of the Statue of Liberty.

But in most periods and places, marble was the material of choice.

There were many varieties – translucent Parian, purple-veined Phrygian, pallid Luna

– which were quarried, by the Roman imperial era, on a proto-industrial scale that scattered

marble statues from Britain to Syria.

Before explaining why so few of those statues have survived intact to the present day, I’d

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