On the fall of Napoleon the Pope chose the sculptor Canova as his envoy to negotiate with the allies for the return of the art treasures of Italy. Canova was successful, for he pleaded from a full heart; but although he secured the restitution of the two hundred and ninety-four statues which Napoleon had taken from the Villa Albani, Cardinal Giuseppe Albani, an unworthy successor of the great collector, sold all but one in order to avoid the cost of their return transportation. The poor peripatetic philosophers, emperors, empresses, gods, and goddesses trooped on like uneasy ghosts, not a few of them finding shelter in the Glyptothek at Munich.
The one piece of sculpture reserved from this fate of expatriation, and reinstated in triumph in its old position in the salon at the left of the main gallery of the villa, it is hardly necessary to state, was the relief of _Antinous_. Here it remains and lures us, according to our bent, to study or to dream of the life which its original so passionately lived, and instinctively we search for some statue of a woman of equal charm to link with it in our dreams.
Ebers thought he had found it in the loveliest of the nine muses which Ligorio discovered in the theatre of Hadrian's villa. In 1689 Velasquez was sent to Rome to acquire them for Philip V. Eight of them may still be seen in the Museum of Madrid, but the ninth muse, Urania, from which the d'Estes could not then be induced to part, is now in the Sala delle Muse of the Vatican. This is the Urania which Ebers imagines to have been carved by the young Alexandrine sculptor, Pollux, from the Selene whom we are told Antinous vainly loved.
The face is very winsome and the romance might satisfy us, but for a portrait-statue of a genuine Selene, found by Ligorio near the palazzita and now in the casino of the Villa Albani.
It is catalogued as _Iris Descending_, but mistakenly, says Monsieur Guzman, for Iris was invariably represented with wings, and this graceful figure is wingless, a torch in hand, and floating downward so gently that her motion scarcely agitates her soft drapery. Authorities are now agreed that the lovely figure represents Selene, the moon-goddess, who, enamoured with Endymion, kept tryst with him in his dreams, and a beautiful "Sleeping Youth" was actually discovered beneath the descending Selene, thus completing the composition and verifying the assumption as to its subject. That the recumbent youth was not at once recognised as intended to represent Endymion is due to the inability of the scientific mind to grasp more than one idea at a time, for the features bore so marked a resemblance to those of Antoninus Pius that it was rightly considered a portrait of that Emperor in his youth. Only recently have archæologists accepted the title, _Antoninus Pius as Endymion_ and it seems probable that the Selene of Villa Albani portrayed the Empress Faustina, and that this group was a tribute of the Emperor's to his beautiful wife, his "Diva Faustina," who stooped to him like the moon-goddess from the sky. Is it not equally possible that he caused the symbols of Selene to be cut upon her signet that she might use it in her intimate correspondence, that the charm of this wonderful woman was associated in his mind with the magic of moonlight, gentle, love-compelling, and pure? Such a testimonial does in fact exist in a medal struck by the command of Antoninus Pius after the death of the Empress, representing Faustina bearing two torches, but returning to heaven, and depriving him of the light which had illumined their wedded life; and lest there should be any doubt that the deity typified in this apotheosis is Selene the Emperor caused the words _Luna lucifera_ to be engraved beneath the name of Faustina.
