Pasquino

In Renaissance Italy there was a tradition of “speaking sculpture” which also extended to works of antique art - found mostly in Rome - that carried written messages for the public weal. Perhaps the most famous of these was the Pasquino, a fragment (1.92 m high) of a sculptural group representing Menelaus Carrying the Body of Patroclus. According to one local tradition, the statue received its name because it had lain in the yard of a schoolmaster named Pasquino. A story from the mid-sixteenth century claimed that the sculpture had really been found near the shop of a free-speaking tailor — also called Pasquino — famous for his criticisms of the pope and the papal court. The Pasquino was installed near its present location, at what was then the corner of the Palazzo Orsini, by Cardinal Oliviero Carafa in 1501. It quickly became the source of witty, scandalous, and politically and religiously charged comments which were written in Latin on scraps of paper and attached both to it and to the wall behind it.

The engraving showing Pasquino was published by Antonio Lafreri in Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae in Rome in 1550.