THE CASTLE OF ST. ANGELO.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume V, Issue 237, 16 November 1877, Page 19

THE CASTLE OF ST. ANGELO.

The Castle of St. Angelo in Rome, long known as the Mausoleum, or Mole of Hadrian, was built in the latter part of the second century, and since that time it has taken part, so to speak, in all the great events of Pagan and Christian Rome. As far as we know anything of the original appearance of this wonderful and renowned building, derived either from report or from the solid remains which war, earthquake, and time have failed to obliterate, it seems to have been founded on its great prototype, that wonder of the world which Artemisia erected to her Carian Lord, and the broken fragments of which, after many centuries, have finally found a home among a people who, when it was built, were outer barbarians. Both suffered terribly from the violence of man and nature ; but while the tomb of Mausolus was levelled to tlie ground, so that the grass covered its site and obliterated even its vestiges, the tomb of Hadrian, resisting all assaults of time, still stands unshaken in massive masonry. Of the admirable sculpture, however, that once adorned these magnificent mausoleums, even less remains of the latter Roman work than of its Carian rival. Nothing, in fact, now exists of all the statues that stood on Hadrian's tomb save the so-called Barberini Faun now in the gallery at Munich ; and this noble work, which, in breadth of style, spirit of conception, and rendering of character, may challenge comparison with the best works of Greece, only deepens our sense of the loss art has sustained in the destruction of all the rest. It is also probable that the colossal busts of Hadrian himself ami of Pallas, now in the Vatican, came from this mausoleum, as well as the large sarcophagus of black and white in the Musco Pio Clementino, the porphyry basin which forms the baptismal font of St. Peter's, and tho porphyry sarcophagus in which Innocent 11. was buried. — Exchange.