Published Catalogue Text: Stone Sculptures: The Greek, Roman and Etruscan Collections of the Harvard University Art Museums , written 1990
108
Funerary Stele of “Child Eirenaios”
The upper part, with the subject's bust, frontally, in high relief, is preserved. The surfaces are weathered and somewhat pitted. The stone has a brown patina. The inscription is in Greek.
ΕΙΡΗΑ ΙΣΕΙΡΗ
ΝΑΙWT WΠΑΙΔ
WMNIAΣ ΠAΡIΝ
(on either side of the head)
The half figure is represented with head and body shown frontally, arms firmly at the sides. The style of the child's hair suggest a date in the Hadrianic period, probably about 120 A.D.
A stele of this type is in the Archaeological Museum, Istanbul, unfortunately without provenance. An obese child's bust is shown in middle to late second or third century A.D. form, down almost to the middle of the ribcage; the bust in relief is also represented as mounted on a small plinth or large pedestal (Mendel, 1914, p. 162, no. 947). A funerary relief of Alexandros in Lieden shows a similar, half-figure bust of a boy and was brought from Thera-Santorini; it has been dated in the Roman Imperial period (Bastet, Brunsting, 1982, pp. 91-92, no. 171, pl. 46). The purpose in these reliefs is to suggest a portrait-bust of the deceased.
These half-figure busts in relief of fat little children came into the art of the Graeco-Roman Imperial East not only from Egypt or Attica, or the Greek islands, but from Roman sarcophagi created for export to all parts of the Empire, especially Macedonia and North Africa. The busts of children on the sarcophagus in Algiers, Musée National des Antiquités, from Hadrumetum and dated A.D. 225-250, bears this out (Wrede, 1981, p. 200, pls. 18, 19). Whether sophisticated, as on sarcophagi, or rustic, as on this stele, these funerary children were part of the pan-Mediterranean verism of the Roman Empire.
Cornelius Vermeule and Amy Brauer
