2nd century AD, From Rome, Relief, Ripiano I (PC)

Relief with Marcus Aurelius offering a sacrifice to Jupiter Capitoline (Pietas Augusti)

Inv. Scu 807

Together with the other two panels walled in Shelf I of the staircase of the Palazzo dei Conservatori, it depicts an episode in the life of Emperor Marcus Aurelius.

The relief comes from the decoration of a triumphal arch erected in AD 176 in the Roman Forum at the foot of the Capitoline Hill to celebrate Emperor Marcus Aurelius’s victories over the Germanic peoples and Sarmatians.

The work was created during Marcus Aurelius’s reign, in the years ranging from AD 177 to 180.

The arch most likely had already been destroyed in the 6th century AD, when the first descriptions of the reliefs record them as being walled in the walls of the Church of Santa Martina, built in the Roman Forum upon the ruins of the Secretarium Senatus, a hall of the Curia Julia, site of a penal tribunal, established in the 4th century AD.