La Vittoria al Museo di Kassel da Forum Sempronii

In the Museum of Kassel is a bronze statue of a winged Victory standing on a globe, purchased by the Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel Frederick II in the late eighteenth century in Rome and found, according to the antiques dealer who sold it, in Fossombrone, the ancient Forum Sempronii (Pesaro-Urbino). On the basis of meticulous archival research, the authors are now able to demonstrate the actual origin of the bronze from the municipium of Forum Sempronii and its discovery in 1660 in an area corresponding to the monumental center of the ancient city, probably within the civil Basilica. The statue, known as "The Victory of Fossombrone", is a piece of high artistic quality and probably reproduces the type of the Victoria Augusta located in the Curia Iulia by Octavianus in 29 BC. The iconography of The Victory of Fossombrone also had considerable fortune in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, enough to be used for example as a model for the bronze of The Victory placed on the hand of the Napoleon Canova made in 1806. The presence of the bronze Victory in Forum Sempronii is not an isolated case but part of a broad context of discoveries of whole sculptures and hundreds of fragments of bronze statues, occurred since the fifteenth century all over the territory corresponding to the current Marche Region. Most of such sculptures reached the antiquities market enriching public and private collections throughout the world, such as the so-called "Idolino" from Pesaro in Florence and the head of a horse from Suasa in Baltimore.