Juno Ludovisi
The Juno Ludovisi is a colossal Roman marble head of the 1st century CE from an acrolithic statue of an idealized and youthful Antonia Minor as the goddess Juno. Added to the Ludovisi collection formed by Cardinal Ludovico Ludovisi, it is now in the Palazzo Altemps, Museo Nazionale Romano, Rome.
Casts of it are to be seen at the University of Cambridge Classics Dept Casts Gallery., Bryn Mawr and the Goethehaus in Weimar, Germany and the University of Tartu Art Museum in Estonia.
The American-British novelist Henry James wrote of the Ludovisi Juno several times including in his first long form novel Roderick Hudson. He described it in its surrlund as follows..."One warm, still day, late in the Roman autumn, our two young men were seated beneath one of the high-stemmed pines of the Villa Ludovisi. They had been spending an hour in the mouldy little garden-house where the colossal mask of the famous Juno looks out with blank eyes from that dusky corner which must seem to her the last possible stage of a lapse from Olympus"...
