THE NEOCLASSICAL SHE-WOLVES OF VALADIER AND PINELLI

The roman she-wolf is a cultural monument. whether made of stone or words, metal or pigment, the picture of a wild beast nursing two human babies is an enduring one and continues to speak of the past – especially of a great Roman past – like few other objects. In the course of the nineteenth century, the she-wolf became an icon of the desire for Italian national unity: Her indigenous form united nature and culture, present and past, and two different babies under one protector. Naturally, then, images of the she-wolf appear in architectural structures of modern Rome. There are she-wolves, for example, on that most visible of its buildings, the Vittoriano of Piazza Venezia, the controversial monument to the first king of united Italy, Victor Emmanuel II, situated at the foot of the Capitoline Hill. An allegorical she-wolf accompanies the Tyrrhenian Sea in one of the Fountains of the Two Seas and, at the top of the monument, the bronze allegories of Liberty and Unity ride triumphal chariots on the hubs of which wheels are the heads of she-wolves. In a monument such as the Vittoriano, which repeatedly summons images of past incarnations of Rome – a monument that has been described as “a rhetorical device for manipulating public memory” (Atkinson and Cosgrove 31) – the she-wolf carries out her multiple political tasks.