Published Catalogue Text: Stone Sculptures: The Greek, Roman and Etruscan Collections of the Harvard University Art Museums , written 1990
126
Right Upper Corner of the Front of a Fluted Sarcophagus
The right part of the relief is missing. The figure of a standing woman is cracked on a line going across the breast, with another on a line along the right arm and across to the waist. The surfaces are worn, the modeling indistinct. Three holes are drilled in the base. The piece was reused in the Middle Ages (Guntram Koch, according to notes in object file). The back was cut down, and a mosaic with two red bands and black patterns was inserted.
The woman is fully draped and holds the himation with her right hand, in a version of the so-called pudicitia gesture, or the pose of a Muse. Her head is turned to the left.
Her position and general pose can be visualized by the lady on the left front of the large, columnar sarcophagus with portals, in Cordoba (Himmelmann, 1973, p. IX, pl. 7). On a fluted sarcophagus of the fourth century A.D., a similar lady stands in the rectangular frame of the left front, with Orpheus charming the beasts in the center panel and the husband as a philosopher in the frame on the right front corner (Pesce, 1957, pp. 102-103, no. 57, figs. 113-116, at Porto Torres, Basilica di San Gavino, in the crypt). Usually the women are on the left instead of the right front corner, unless two women are involved. Compare, for style and date, the lady in orans pose on the left front of a fragmentary strigilar sarcophagus in Bonn (Bieber, 1977, p. 251, fig. 892).
There are, of course, many illustrations of Roman sarcophagi reused in Medieval times, usually as coffins. Those brought from the Ostia necropolis to the Campo Santo at Pisa are classic examples. Sarcophagi were also used as storage chests and as fountain basins, particularly in Renaissance times when their carving was appreciated for historical and literary as well as symbolic reasons. Sarcophagi cut into slabs and carved or inlaid on the flattened interior surfaces are rather rarer. A spectacular example is in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, a section of strigilar front with an Amorino supporting an imago clipeata at the left, turned on its right end and carved with two Neapolitan, French-style, Late Gothic saints (Agnes and ?) in a setting of two arches supported in the center by a slender column (Vermeule, C., Cahn, Hadley, 1977, pp. 42-43, no. 58, and p. 68, no. 96).
Cornelius Vermeule and Amy Brauer
