How A Mosaic From Roman Emperor’s Party Ship Ended Up As A Coffee Table
Image via 60 Minutes by CBS
When the Roman emperor Caligula commissioned lavish ships to be built as destination for all manner of a good time, it’s pretty safe to assume that he never really thought that a bit of it would end up being used as a coffee table a couple of millennia later.
But that’s exactly what happened. After the ships’ wreckage was salvaged at the very end of the 19th century, this piece of mosaic somehow wound up in an apartment in Manhattan, where it faithfully served its new purpose.
During Sunday’s episode of 60 Minutes by CBS, Italian marble expert Dario Del Bufalo recalls how the artifact was discovered after all this time.
His 2013 book Porphyry described the rock used by the Roman emperors for their mosaics at the time. A visual example given was that a red, purple, green, and white mosaic used in flooring on Caligula’s ships.
“There was a lady with a young guy with a strange hat that came to the table,” Del Bufalo tells CBS of a book signing event. “And he told her, ‘What a beautiful book. Oh, Helen, look, that’s your mosaic.’ And she said, ‘Yeah, that’s my mosaic.’”
Image via 60 Minutes by CBS
Helen, as it turns out, was Helen Fioratti, a gallery owner who had purchased the mosaic with her husband from an Italian noble family in the 1960s, reported by the New York Times in 2017. This piece was then turned into a coffee table in their Manhattan home, becoming a firm favorite.
Unfortunately, it couldn’t remain as a coffee table forever: The Guardian reports that according to the office of the Manhattan district attorney, evidence suggests the mosaic was stolen during World War II.
Fioratti, who wasn’t aware of the piece’s origins, wasn’t charged with any offence in Italy, but it meant that the mosaic had to be returned to the country. It since has gone on display at the Museum of the Roman Ships in Nemi earlier this spring.
Del Bufalo, speaking in 60 Minutes, states that he felt bad for Fioratti. “But I couldn't do anything different, knowing that my museum in Nemi is missing the best part that went through the centuries, through the war, through a fire, and then through an Italian art dealer, and finally could go back to the museum.”
He also says that he’d like to make a copy of the mosaic for Fioratti so that she could still have it—sort of—with her. “I think my soul would feel a little better.”
A New York Times article on the table, published in March, refers to speculation surrounding Caligula as a “deranged and despotic ruler” complete with a “voracious sexual appetite” and a penchant for cruelty. However, it’s not to say that everything about this account of him is true.
Barry Stuart Strauss, a professor of history and classics at Cornell University, tells the news outlet that there’s a lot of “fake news” surrounding this figure. Although he wasn’t a pleasant person to be acquainted with, not everything you might hear about him is true.
“I don’t want to make him out to be a nice guy or something,” he explains, and continues to say that when Caligula was assassinated in 41 AD, “it wasn’t difficult to find people who wanted to assassinate him.”
When Caligula died, his party ships were destroyed and sank to the bottom of Lake Nemi. They were finally recovered in 1929 and 1931, and the mosaic happened to be among the found artifacts. As they say, the rest is history.
[via the New York Post, images via 60 Minutes by CBS]
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