‘They had no idea it was Caligula’: bronze bust of Roman emperor found

A tiny Roman rarity cast near Vesuvius and once owned by the writer and politician Horace Walpole has been discovered by an eagle-eyed curator

A bronze bust of the “mad and bad” Roman emperor Caligula has been found 200 years after it disappeared – and 2,000 years since it was cast. It had been gifted in the mid-18th century to Horace Walpole, the writer, aesthete and Whig politician, who designed his own gothic home, Strawberry Hill, in Twickenham, south-west London.

After his death in 1797, the 13cm (5in) high bust had several owners, and was even thought, in the 19th century, to be of Alexander the Great rather than Caligula. Now, after 10 years of detective work, Dr Silvia Davoli, a curator at Strawberry Hill, has rediscovered the bust and had it confirmed by top experts as of Caligula. The breakthrough came when Davoli matched a drawing, which Walpole had commissioned in the 1780s of the bust, with a bronze stored in the private art and antiques collection of the Schroders investment company. “They had no idea it was Caligula,” says Davoli. “I was so happy when I finally saw the bronze and made the link.”