Published Catalogue Text: Stone Sculptures: The Greek, Roman and Etruscan Collections of the Harvard University Art Museums , written 1990
95
Rectangular Decorative Relief Depicting Hermes Carrying the Infant Dionysos
Greek, neo-Attic, last part of the first century B.C.
The corners of the slab have been chopped off, and there is ancient and later wear to the surfaces.
The subject is Hermes carrying the infant Dionysos to the nymphs of Nysa; a nymph was seated, receiving the child, in the now lost right side of the panel. Hermes strides to the right, holding the infant Dionysos in front of him. The former wears his petasos and a chlamys pinned on the right shoulder and flowing out behind him. The latter is wrapped in an ample himation. A fillet molding, 0.03m wide, serves as a groundline, and there are cutdown traces of a similar, thinner molding at the left.
The central group reproduced in this relief (including the personification of Nysa or the chief nymph) was combined with standard Neo-Attic Dionysiac figures on rectangular reliefs, circular bases, vases, and the supports for candelabra in Graeco-Roman times, from the age of Augustus through that of Hadrian (27 B.C. to A.D. 137). A circular puteal or wellhead in the Vatican Museums from a villa at Albano, as well as the famous marble krater signed by Salpion, in Naples, gives a rich repertory of figures surrounding the main group, including an old Silenus, dancing and flute-blowing satyrs, and a maenad beating on a tambourine (Lippold, 1956, pp. 240-244, pl. 112, 113).
A relief such as the Del Drago-Harvard example must have been set on a villa or garden wall between other such reliefs with the same stock neo-Attic figures also appearing together on the marble kraters and wellheads.
Cornelius Vermeule and Amy Brauer
