Abstract
In a recent book, Dante poeta veltro (Florence, 1953), Leonardo Olschki discussed the statues of Castor and Pollux that stand at the top of the ramp leading onto the Capitoline hill in Rome. He showed that these representations of the Dioscures were brought to the heart of the Renaissance city not merely as works of art, but as symbols: symbols of heavenly protection (they are the Gemini of the Zodiac) and of Liberty (to Dante they stood for popular resistance to tyranny), in which roles they had been the guardians of Rome since ancient times. In addition, Olschki discovered an attribute appended for political reasons by a sixteenth-century Pontiff, Clement VII, that made the twins respectively the Pope and the Emperor—co-rulers of the modern Roman Empire.
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