Sculptuur van Marco Nonio Balbo te paard before 1879

This is Giorgio Sommer's photograph of the sculpture of Marco Nonio Balbo on horseback. Sommer, who spent his career in Italy, captured this image during a time of great archaeological discovery in the region. The photograph presents a society deeply fascinated by its classical past. We see Balbo, a figure of power and status in ancient Rome, immortalized in stone and then re-presented through Sommer's lens. The sculpture embodies the ideals of Roman masculinity – strength, authority, and civic duty. But Sommer's photograph also brings this ancient figure into a new light, a nineteenth-century context marked by its own imperial ambitions and social hierarchies. What does it mean to look back at the Roman Empire, to idealize its leaders, during a time of colonial expansion? How might ideas about race and class have shaped both the creation of the original sculpture and its later photographic reproduction? While the original sculpture was likely intended to convey a message of power and legitimacy, Sommer's photograph invites us to consider how these messages persist and transform across centuries.