#PhallusThursday offers us an odd double-phallused #Priapus in the #Lupanar or brothel in #Pompeii. This generous endowment must be a nod to, or a hope for, the large number of men frequenting this business space. We have so many clients that our Priapus has two #phalli!

This #ivory panel now in #Milan was once the front of an #Evangeliary or book of the #Gospels. Made probably in 550-560, it shows scenes from the life of #Christ and is a triumphant assertion of #orthodoxy over #heresy, made probably for the glowing bishop #Neon of #Ravenna.

Well, did you evah? What a swell children's party this is, for #SarcophagusSaturday. Two seated figures on either side, one missing her face, seem to be imitating the roles of #Ariadne and #Dionysus. This child's #sarcophagus shows an earthly metaphor for a joyous afterlife.

La primera parte me ha reconciliado con la novela histórica. No sé si voy yo más deprisa leyendo o Luisma y Desperta Ferro publicando, pero esta bilogía es fantástica. Muchas gracias a @DespertaFerro y a @luisma_lopez

#ReliefWednesday leads us to the #CastelloPiccolomini in #Celano in western #Abruzzo, where the enormous #Torlonia fiefdom of #Fucino occupies the drained bed of the Fucine Lake. One of the finds from the draining is this amazing C2 #relief of a city and its surrounding land.

#SpoliaSunday brings us to the wonderful #Turtle #Fountain in #Rome, whose #marble may well come entirely from the #temple of #Apollo #Sosianus, not a #manubial temple but its opposite, a grovelling temple by a former enemy trying to get back into the good graces of #Augustus.

This #Etruscan tombstone comes from #Vulci, and is now in the #VillaGiulia in #Rome. It still has traces of #polychromy, but the central figure is surrounded by an #inscription, for #EpigraphyTuesday, that echoes the same concerns of #Roman tomb inscriptions.

For #ReliefWednesday this time we're back at the huge disorganised repository of the #BathsofDiocletian, to discover a most unusual #column #capital with two damaged #imperial #portraits where you'd expect the #Ionic part of a #Composite capital to be.

#FrescoFriday this week offers a challenge to which I openly admit to not being equal. This magnificent #fresco is in the #antiquarium of #Pompeii, with few details. Its generous use of expensive #cinnabar and complex fictive #architecture suggest it comes from a villa of the 1%.

Dazzling black and white #mosaic helps the week start properly on #MosaicMonday, this time at #VillaAdriana or #Hadrian's Villa at #Tivoli outside #Rome, in the guest quarters or #Hospitalia, for ranking but not top-ranked male guests. And look out for the stealth #guilloche!

#SarcophagusSaturday plunges us into the gloomy #crypt under the basilica of the #SSApostoli in #Rome to ponder a near-illegible #Christian #sarcophagus that supports the #relics of Saints Philip and James the Less, apparently a foot of one and a bone of the other.

#Jerusalem, #Constantinople, #Rome, all crammed together in an imaginary holy cityscape with #Christ and the #Apostles, plus two women who aren't #Pudentiana and #Praxedes, for #MosaicMonday. This oldest #Christian #mosaic in Rome is fully a product of the classical world.

One of the most prominent uses of #spolia in #Rome is in its church floors, and none so spectacular as those made by the #Cosmati family of masons. This #SpoliaSunday we're visiting #SanCrisogono in #Trastevere where even Christian tombstones could be fodder for a new pavement.

El Nazareno de León estará en devoto besapié en la majestuosa basílica de sant'Andrea della Valle. Pocas iglesias de Roma superan este canto al Barroco en su máximo esplendor. @jhsleon @procesionroma25

For #MosaicMonday we're swinging by the #Louvre in #Paris, that great repository of colonial loot, to look down upon a #Christian floor #mosaic from #Antioch on the #Orontes in modern #Turkey, a wonderful rug in stone with a charming #frame of #antelopes.

#FrescoFriday leads us down into the ruins of a ruin, the #HouseoftheSkeleton in #Herculaneum, to see what remains of the #fresco work in the most important room of the #domus. Warning: unexpected #peacock.

Esta monumental biografía nos acerca a la figura del primer emperador hispano, astuto político, hábil comandante y Optimus Princeps para sus contemporáneos, y a una época, el siglo II d. C., en la que Roma alcanzaba con Trajano sus máximas cotas de poder, expansión territorial e

#Taldíacomohoy en 2016 publicaba en redes que la Colección Mariano Moret habia participado con un grabado de Hendrik #Goltzius (Cristo orando en el Monte de los Olivos, 1597) en el catálogo de la magna exposición sobre Francisco #Pacheco en @MuseoBASe... Sigue

Algo que sorprende al llegar a Berlín es la presencia de una iglesia rota en el medio de la ciudad. ¿Por qué? Como sospechas, es un recuerdo de la guerra. Pero lo más interesante es cómo se produjo esta decisión. Hoy en #berlinespobreperosexi: La iglesia rota.

For a #ReliefWednesday which is also my birthday, I offer you one of the great beauties of #Etruscan art, the #Apollo of the #Scasato, from #FaleriiVeteres, today's #CivitaCastellana, but today basking in the admiration of visitors in #Rome.