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.[1]
Description
Trajan is shown bareheaded and wearing a tunic,[1] holding a scroll in his left hand while gesturing with his right hand raised.[2]
A plaque at its base contains the inscription:
STATUE BELIEVED TO BE OF THE ROMAN EMPEROR TRAJAN/ A.D. 98–117/ IMPERATOR CAESAR NERVA TRAJANUS AUGUSTUS/ PRESENTED BY THE TOWER HILL IMPROVEMENT TRUST AT THE/ REQUEST OF THE REVEREND P. B. CLAYTON, CH, MC, DD, /FOUNDER PADRE OF TOC H.[2][3]
History
The statue was installed in 1980 as a bequest from P. B. "Tubby" Clayton, the vicar of All Hallows-by-the-Tower.[1][4] 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.[5] There is no information presented at the site about the sculptor.[2]
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.[4]
^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."
