Museo Nazionale Romano, Palazzo Altemps

This guide to the Palazzo Altemps in Rome opens in 1623, when workers digging a cardinal's new villa unearthed a monumental marble group and mistook it for a gladiator. It traces the sculpture back to a Hellenistic king who commissioned it as a war monument nearly two thousand years earlier, and to the Roman collector Ludovico Ludovisi, who gathered it with a hundred other ancient statues into what became this museum. The collector was Ludovico Ludovisi, the young nephew of a sitting pope, whose obsessive collecting eventually assembled more than a hundred ancient sculptures from digs across the city.