Exhibition: “L’ Amato di Iside. Nerone, la Domus Aurea e l’Egitto”
Rome, Domus Aurea, 22nd June 2023 to 14th January 2024
Focusing on various pieces from the collection of the Sanno Egyptian Museum, Campania, this exhibition looks at what tied the Emperor Nero to ancient Egypt, and where btter to do this that at the recently restored and re-opened ‘Golden House’ of Nero?
Nero lived and breathed – from an early age – the fusion of two great civilisations, with Egypt representing a guiding inspiration for his own empire, with the Domus Aurea itself taking cues from the great Ptolemaic Egyptian palace of Alexandria.
Cults worshipping Isis were common in Nero’s Rome, Nero himself often being represented as a pharaoh devoted to Isis, and this exhibition, largely through statuary, is testimony to the cross-pollination of the epoch.