5 extraordinary sculptures in Rome

Perhaps you’ve already seen angels identical to these on the Castel Sant’Angelo Bridge. In fact, those are the copies. Pope Clement IX deemed Bernini’s late-17th-century originals too precious to be exposed to the elements. Today they’re at the sides of the presbytery.

Bernini said he was trying to portray the ecstasy of communing with God. But for centuries, naughty observers have perceived an ecstasy of the carnal nature in the sculpture of Ludovica Albertoni, much as they have in Bernini’s more famous Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (inside Rome’s Santa Maria della Vittoria). You decide.

A masterpiece from the Etruscan period, which very few bother to visit in this museum just outside the main tourist habitat. Dating back to the 6th century BC, the sarcophagus depicts a couple reclining merrily at a banquet in the afterlife. Excavated in Cerveteri in the 19th-century, it has beguiled art historians ever since.

A stunning example of bronze sculpture to survive Hellenism without being melted down, perhaps for its exceptional beauty and realism: this is not the triumphant victor, but the battered brute, with swollen cheeks, crooked nose, and open wounds. A must-see.

During restoration work at the chapel in 2002, a discovery was made: the bronze drapery that clothed Truth and Charity was not part of Bernini’s design, but was added by sheepish priests in the 19th century. Provocatively, Bernini had sculpted them bare-breasted. The ‘brassieres’ have since been removed. Visits by appointment.