Published Catalogue Text: Stone Sculptures: The Greek, Roman and Etruscan Collections of the Harvard University Art Museums , written 1990
90
Support of a Table or Basin
Most of the satyr's nose is missing. Half of the krater's base is broken off, and the rim is chipped. There is a rectangular dowel hole in the center of the krater, and a pin hole for a repair of the edge above the satyr's head. There are drill marks in the hair and the eyes are hollowed out.
This support is in the form of a head of a laughing, smiling satyr balancing a krater on his shoulders, with drapery between. The drilling of the hair and the hollowed-out eyes support a date in the Flavian or more likely Antonine to Severan periods of the Roman Empire. Satyrs as supports for garden fountains and decorative tables in the courtyards of Roman villas were popular in the country estates of Imperial Rome, especially in the villas along the Alban Hills. An example in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen, has the satyr grasping his panther skin, which is rolled around the water basin on his left shoulder. The satyr himself was drilled for a water pipe in this marble ensemble from a Roman villa (Hadrian's?), below the Villa d'Este at Tivoli (Poulsen, 1951, p. 345, no. 485, pl. XXXVI). The motif of the satyr balancing a krater on his shoulder (all as part of a larger ensemble, a furniture support) developed out of the Hellenistic group of the satyr carrying the infant Dionysos on his shoulder, a statue that existed in mirrored pairs or reversals (Brizzolara, 1982, pp. 178-179, illus.). A variant in Berlin, a lion-footed table leg, shows the satyr's head tilted back in the same fashion as here, an animal (goat?) draped and carried around his shoulders in the good shepherd motif (Conze, 1891, pp. 425-426, no. 1074, seemingly from Italy).
The motif of the satyr carrying a krater on one shoulder occurs in a larger, wider context in the scenes of Antonine and Severan triumph on Dionysos sarcophagi, where satyrs old and young are bringing such vases home from India. Sometimes these kraters or flatter, wider bowls, have handles in the form of lions or panthers climbing into them, all designed to suggest the exotic metalwork of the ancient Near East, the vases created by Greek, Persian, and Parthian craftsmen in the wake of Alexander the Great's conquests. A Dionysiac relief in the Museo Nazionale, Naples, with the god and his satyrs and maenads in intoxicated revels, has a satyr on the left end, seen from the back and hefting a krater just as the satyr of the trapezophoros or loutrophoros in the Harvard Art Museum (Reinach, 1909-1912, p. 68, no. 4).
The repertory of these supports extended to the iconography of barbarians as well as Dionysiac figures, including the kneeling Persians or Scythians carrying large, elaborate vases on their shoulders. A heavily restored example in the Galleria dei Candelabri of the Vatican show the remains of a centaur holding a krater as in the Harvard piece (Lippold, 1956, pp. 180-182, no. 37, pl. 85, also pp. 332-333, no. 74, pl. 146).
Cornelius Vermeule and Amy Brauer
