Osiris at Viterbo

But the most intriguing of Annius’s archeological fabrications was the so-called marmo osiriano — not a forgery, in fact, but a found object, or at least an assemblage of ready made materials. The object was not part of the phoney “excavation;” rather, it could be seen by anyone, Annius reported, in the Cathedral, which naturally was once a Temple of Hercules: “Our forefathers . . . in order to keep the eternal memory of the antiquity of this city before our eyes, placed before the rostra a columnula, that is, an alabaster tablet, monument to the triumph of Osiris.” The marmo osiriano is a semicircular lunette, with vines, birds, and a lizard, mounted in a rectangular frame with two classical-looking profile heads in the corners. Annius interpreted the monument as a fragment of a triumphal column left in Viterbo by Osiris, the Egyptian god. He argued that the profile heads in the spandrel represented Osiris and his cousin Sais Xantho, a muse. This was proof that Osiris really had been to Italy. The birds and other objects in the tree in the lunette were sacred Egyptian letters symbolizing the historical encounter between the Italians, the Giants, and the Egyptians.

(Chr. S. Wood - A. Nagel, Anachronic Renaissance, Zone Books, 2010, pp. 247.249)