THE LUPA AS SYMBOL OF POWER AT THE LATERAN

Maxime Formont's 1912 historical novel, The She-Wolf: A Romance of the Borgias, provides imaginative insight to the impression that the bronze beast must have made during her Lateran residence – the sense of her might heightened by physical and historical distance (she was positioned atop the column and reminiscent of an ancient founder), as well as by the belief in the Lupa's origin on the Capitoline Hill, her endurance across the ages, and the sharp fierceness of her eyes, ears, teeth, and jaws. Although Formont's novel is set during the high Renaissance, the Lupa stayed before the Lateran Palace only until 1471.

MISOGYNY AND THE SHE-WOLF FROM TERTULLIAN TO MASUCCIO

Unlike their pagan predecessors discussed inchapter 4, early Christian writers were not as tolerant of sexual promiscuity, no matter how generous – with milk or money – were the women who practiced it. In his tract titled To the Nations, Tertullian (ca. 155–230), the first great writer of Latin Christianity, rather predictably thundered against the “abominable cases” of shameless veneration of unworthy divinities – Acca Larentia, first and foremost. She is honored, Tertullian inveighed, even though “she was a hired prostitute, whether as the nurse of Romulus, and therefore called Lupa, because she was a prostitute, or as the mistress of Hercules, now deceased, that is to say, now deified” (486). Tertullian described this woman's two major identities: He saw Larentina (i.e., Acca Larentia, her name having several variations) in either the lupa who rescued and nursed Romulus (no great honor; Tertullian had little respect for Rome's founder, in his view a trickster, fratricide, and rapist) or in the wealthy prostitute who had received great riches through Hercules's help and at her death bequeathed her fortune to the Roman people. In gratitude, the Romans deified her. However, what could be the distinction of accessing heaven for heathens and of becoming divine if prostitutes “mount it in all directions” too? Another early Christian writer, Lactantius (third–fourth century ce) – probably from North Africa like Tertullian – likewise ironizes, in his discussion of the Romans' divinization of the she-wolf: “Now how great must that immortality be thought which is attained even by harlots!” (54).

MAMMARY MEANINGS IN THE SHE-WOLF'S VISUAL REPRESENTATION

With a spare compositional structure of three naked figures – one adult animal and two juvenile humans – the statue of the Lupa Capitolina recounts a foundation legend far more intricate than her own shape. Hers is the story that Romans have been telling for centuries about their own past, so that it is enough to see a wolf give suck to a set of twins to know exactly who she is, what she has done, and what will happen a few years hence. In a compact frame, the bronze image at the Capitoline Museum expresses ancient legends of divine intervention in human history. This is the story that the Lupa has long been believed to be telling; the statue, after all, may have had nothing to do with the twins when the bronze was first cast. Then there are the stories of the bronze She-Wolf herself, tales of varying reception and changing usage, including accounts of both worldly and supernatural power struggles – ancient as well as medieval, early modern, and contemporary. Of course, the complexity of the bronze Lupa can best be understood in the context of other visual as well as verbal she-wolves and by being mindful of the interpretations attached to all these beasts.

The wolf's much-sung teats and tongue dramatize attitudes of and toward mothers, of and toward poets.

The word troia in italian may describe a female animal – a sow – or a human sex worker: troia is a derogatory term for a female prostitute. Capitalize the word, however, and it becomes, instead, the illustrious ancient city of Troy, Rome's urban ancestor. Likewise, the Latin word lupa has two meanings: It indicates, metaphorically, a prostitute; yet lupa is also the she-wolf who suckled Romulus and Remus. It is from the fusion of two separate legends embedded in each of these two ambiguous, grammatically feminine words – troia and lupa – that the story of Rome's birth derives: the fifth-century bce Greek legend, which attributed Rome's founding to the Trojan hero Aeneas around the twelfth century bce, and the later indigenous legend of the she-wolf, dating from 300 bce and according to which a native founder and his twin brother were saved by a local beast four and a half centuries earlier. By the first century bce, the two legends had blended harmoniously, making Romulus a descendant of Aeneas as a compromise and with a few hundred years elapsing between the births of the two alleged (and, until then, competing) founders. However crucial Aeneas's arrival on Italian soil, though, and no matter how necessary Romulus's building of Rome's first wall and his murder of his brother, it is the scene of the she-wolf nursing two baby boys – and the narrative that this image tells – that remains the most visible and most frequently represented moment in the story of Rome's foundation.

A SHE-WOLF AMONG ROME'S ANIMALS

When considering the presence of animals in the history and the geography of Rome, there is little doubt that the she-wolf comes first: There is no Rome before her and there would be no Rome without her. Rome is a she-wolf and the she-wolf is – in so many ways – Rome. As Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi, writer and politician, wrote in 1863, “Rome has the nature of the she-wolf” (572). The beast is maternal: She rescues and feeds twins of a different species the way Rome, since its beginnings, has hosted visitors from other lands and settlers of diverse backgrounds; the wolf god was the protector of fugitives and exiles, and these outcasts were indeed the earliest inhabitants of Romulus's city. (Of course, one never knows whether Rome and the she-wolf will protect their vulnerable charges or gobble them up.) The she-wolf is a wild predator that attacks those weaker than herself; she prefers lambs above all else. Rome, too, has done its share of preying on the weakness of others; any history book easily confirms the city's proverbial greed: “The she-wolf of Rome devoured many sheep. Carthage, Corinth, Jericho, Jerusalem, Londinum (London), Piraeus, Seleucia, Troy – these are but a few of the cities that the Romans destroyed” (Schneider 133). The she-wolf, perhaps, was not a wild animal at all but rather a very human prostitute, her profession indicated by the Latin word for she-wolf, lupa.

She-wolves, in figurative language, are usually human females. Whether fictional or historical, powerful women have long been described with this animal name to suggest their political ambition, sexual insatiability, maternal obsessions, or illicit desires: Marie Antoinette, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Reynard's Hersent, Masuccio's unnamed lady, De Sade's Madame Saint Ange, and Verga's Pina (see Chapters 5 and 6) are some examples of this metaphorical practice. The she-wolf's voracious hunger, in misogynous discourse, can have a variety of objects – primarily politics, sex, and motherhood. Revenge is one of its motivating forces. One such human she-wolf, maternal and vengeful, appears in Victor Hugo's acclaimed 1831 novel, Notre-Dame de Paris. This wolfish woman is a walled-up recluse who rejoices at the news that a gypsy woman has been executed because gypsies had long ago abducted her only daughter. Her fierce motherhood mixes with a blind hunger for revenge, turning the recluse into the caged beast that best embodies such characteristics: “And she began pacing up and down before the bars of her window, disheveled, eyes blazing, banging her shoulder against the wall, with the wild look of a caged she-wolf which has long been hungry and feels feeding time draw near” (360). I describe Victor Hugo's recluse as a way to introduce Rome's own caged she-wolves: Unlike their Parisian counterparts, Rome's captives were not only allegorical animals but also flesh and blood.

during the course of a year i spent in the eternal city, the Roman she-wolf edged her way into my daily life, subtly yet insistently demanding this book be written. Living in Rome made the encounter inevitable: No one can go to Rome and not meet the she-wolf. There was a stone she-wolf suckling twins on the façade of my children's elementary school and other she-wolves lactating on several public buildings that my family passed every day. A she-wolf, teeth and udders exposed, was stuccoed above each entrance to the neighborhood covered market where we did much of our shopping. She-wolves were engraved on the potholes and trash cans in our neighborhood and airbrushed on the sides of the delivery van to the little grocery store next door, and – more predictably – she-wolves graced the sides of monuments that we admired and the hallways of museums we visited.

The timing of our arrival in the summer of 2006 made the she-wolf's presence all the more unavoidable: She had just been chosen – not surprisingly – as the mascot for Rome's first film festival. In preparation for the weeklong October event, posters featuring the photograph of a live wolf dotted the city. Although she strikes the pose of the bronze statue in the Capitoline Museum – standing and looking intently at her viewer, ready to attack, heedless of the babies tugging at her distended udders – the focus is on the animal's face, adorned by a glittering red carnival mask shaped like a butterfly.

VIEWING THE LUPA WITH NINETEENTH-CENTURY VISITORS

Travelers to rome often wrote of the bronze lupa: they wrote to show off their knowledge or to admit their ignorance; they wrote in fear or in admiration; they were by turns irritated by the she-wolf's ubiquity or stunned by the beast's persistence. More or less consciously, they identified in the statue the multiple layers that give her – and Rome – their stratified essence, their palimpsest appearance. In these texts, even as the statue's meanings accrue with each passing year and as the She-Wolf comes to embody an increasingly longer past and to acquire an increasingly venerable history, she also participates in the aesthetics of loss characteristic of the contemplation of ruins. The Capitoline She-Wolf is certainly a well-preserved work of art, and we would be hard-pressed to call it a ruin. Yet, throughout her existence, the bronze beast has been closely associated with the condition of ruins. Most visibly, visitors have repeatedly sought to observe the harm purportedly inflicted on the statue's hind legs by the lightning described in Cicero's writings: These “wounds” authenticated the Lupa as ancient because she is damaged and eloquent in her ancient injury.

In 1789, Hester Lynch Piozzi, British diarist and author, informed her readers that “In this repository of wonders, this glorious Campidoglio” she was shown “the very wolf which bears the very mark of the lightning mentioned by Cicero” (Piozzi 385).