Image Details

The Speed Art Museum

Kentucky businessman and collector Rogers Clark Ballard Thruston, shown surrounded by the antiquities he donated to Louisville’s Speed Art Museum in 1929, assembled one of the largest collections of well-provenanced Roman funerary artifacts in the United States. These objects were recovered from a communal tomb, discovered in Rome in 1895, used by the city’s non-elite population (including slaves and freed slaves). The burial goods consisted of stone epitaphs, marble cinerary urns and simple ceramic vessels and lamps.