The statue of Trajan is an outdoor twentieth-century bronze sculpture depicting the Roman Emperor Trajan, located in front of a section of the London Wall built by Romans, at Tower Hill in London, United Kingdom.
Description Trajan is shown bareheaded and wearing a tunic, holding a scroll in his left hand while gesturing with his right hand raised.
A plaque at its base contains the inscription:
History The statue was installed in 1980 as a bequest from P. B. "Tubby" Clayton, the vicar of All Hallows-by-the-Tower. The Museum of London believes the figure to have been recovered from a scrapyard in Southampton in the 1920s, and notes that its head does not match its body. There is no information presented at the site about the sculptor.
It is a cast of a late 1st century statue found in Minturno, which is on display at the National Archaeological Museum in Naples.Philip Ward-Jackson, Public Sculpture of the City of London (p. 407) - Liverpool University Press, 2003. From this book we quote: "The statue is a bronze reproduction, not a very good one, of a marble statue of Trajan, discovered at Minturno, which is now in the Museo Nazionale in Naples." The upper part of the head is the result of restoration;Mostra Augustea della Romanità, L'Erma di Bretschneider, 1968, (p. 160); ISBN 9788870620603."Roma caput mundi", il mito della grandezza other casts are in Rome (at the via dei Fori Imperiali and Museum of Roman Civilization), Ancona and Benevento.
Trajan presided over the second-greatest military expansion in Roman history, after Augustus, leading the empire to attain its maximum territorial extent by the time of his death. He never himself visited Britain.
See also List of public art in the City of London Statue of Trajan, Rome
References
External links
London's Roman walls, BBC