Pasquino

Pasquino or Pasquin (Latin: Pasquillus) is the name used by Romans to describe a battered Hellenistic-style statue dating to the 3rd century BC, which was unearthed in the Parione district of Rome in the 15th century. The statue's fame dates to the early 16th century, when Cardinal Oliviero Carafa draped the marble torso of the statue in a toga and decorated it with Latin epigrams on the occasion of Saint Mark's Day. From this incident are derived the English-language terms pasquinade and pasquil, which refer to an anonymous lampoon in verse or prose.In verse, the pasquinade finds a classical source in the epigrams of Martial: John W. Spaeth, Jr., "Martial and the Pasquinade" Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 70 (1939:242-255).

The Cardinal's actions led to a custom of criticizing the pope or his government by the writing of satirical poems in broad Roman dialect--called "pasquinades" from the Italian "pasquinate"--and attaching them to the statue "Pasquino". Thus Pasquino became the first "talking statue" of Rome.The actual identification of the sculptural subject was made in the eighteenth century by the antiquarian Ennio Quirino Visconti, who identified it as the torso of Menelaus supporting the dying Patroclus; the more famous of two Medici versions of this Menelaus supporting the body of Patroclus is in the Loggia dei Lanzi, Florence. The Pasquino is...
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