Published Catalogue Text: Stone Sculptures: The Greek, Roman and Etruscan Collections of the Harvard University Art Museums , written 1990
102
Fragment of a Relief
Two heads, facing center, are cut off at the neck. The noses are missing and the surfaces are worn.
The bearded head, in front of the strip of two-part molding, is turned to the right. The helmeted head of Athena or Roma-Virtus faces left, toward the man. Part of the man's shoulder seems to remain at the left, and the helmeted female figure may have been raising her arm to pat her helmet, as on the later Cancelleria relief in Rome.
The bearded man, who wears a fillet in his hair, could be a local man of letters, or he could be a representation of the Demos of Seleucia Pieria or Antioch, the latter city usually personified by her famous Tyche of Eutychides seated above the swimming river Orontes. This fragment of a figured panel with architectural molding certainly comes from a civic or commemorative rather than a funerary relief. If the bearded man were a famous private citizen rather than a god (like Asklepios) or a personification (like Boule or Demos), then the panel might have had a mixture of real people and divinities, like the Zoilos frieze at Aphrodisias in Caria or the Late Antique reliefs in the façade of the Temple of Hadrian at Ephesus.
The pair (part of a series) of limestone reliefs dedicated in A.D. 159 by a Palmyrene priest in the Temple of the Gaddé (or Fortunes) of Palmyra and Dura at Dura-Europos on the Euphrates, although Palmyrene in style, shows god, heroes, and real people in frontal poses suggestive of what the Antiochene relief-fragment must have looked like when complete (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1976, p. 48, under no. 63). It would be natural that, in the second and third centuries A.D. (save in times of military crisis), Antioch-on-the-Orontes and its port or suburbs would produce the Roman counterparts in marble to what the Palmyrenes created in their special styles in limestone.
Cornelius Vermeule and Amy Brauer
