Published Catalogue Text: Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern Bronzes at the Harvard Art Museums
On this parabolic relief plaque the goddess Cybele is depicted frontally with her hands cupping her breasts. The relief is thinnest at the edges and thickest at the center, near the goddess’s hands. Cybele is veiled, and her headdress is decorated with six griffin protomes. Her hair, visible beneath the veil, is pulled up from her face, and three long and tightly coiled locks fall on either shoulder. She wears a mantle over a peplos and a bracelet on each wrist. Three to four digits on each hand are depicted. A raised linear border encircles the plaque. There is a band with alternating rosettes and lotuses on the bottom. The main campus is bordered on the bottom side by a raised bar and around the curved area by an egg-and-dart pattern. On the upper portion of the back is an incuse or incised circle. Within the circle is a nude female, torso turned frontally and legs to the right in profile, riding a horned animal, perhaps a goat, to the left, rendered in incuse.
Given the plaque’s thickness, M. Y. Treister considered it to have been a matrix, over which thin metal would have been hammered to take the shape of the relief (1). The embossed plaque that was created could be used as a votive or for decoration. A thin parabolic silver sheet with a similar depiction of the goddess, wearing a modius (calythos) but within a parabola and holding her breasts, from the Kerameikos Museum, Athens, inv. no. M 362, could have been made on a matrix like this one (2), as could have a gold repoussé fragment in the Musée du Louvre, Paris, inv. no. AO 2066 (3). A rectangular bronze matrix in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, inv. no. 20.2.24, bears several scenes related to Cybele in intaglio on both sides, some divided into discrete units by architectural elements or geometric borders. One of these scenes is a depiction of a bust and torso of Cybele, hands cupping her breasts, within a parabolic border that is very similar to the Athens and Paris examples and iconographically related to the Harvard plaque (4). H. Seyrig compares the Louvre example with a more elaborate plaque in plaster of similar form depicting the goddess making the same gesture in Cairo (5). Plaques like the Harvard, New York, and Cairo examples could have been used as matrixes or models in the creation of the thin repoussé appliques for decorative or votive purposes (6).
NOTES:
1. Id., “A Bronze Matrix in the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University and the Genesis of 2nd-3rd century AD Matrices in the Balkans,” Hammering Techniques in Greek and Roman Jewellery and Toreutics, Colloquia Pontica 8 (Leiden, 2001) 349-54, fig. 121.
2. Treister 2001 (supra 1) 350, fig. 50.
3. Lexicon Iconograpicum Mythologiae Classicae Astarte no. 4c. Many goddesses of the Near East have similar iconography, often related to the great goddess (Magna Mater or Cybele) wearing a mural crown or modius and accompanied by lions.
4. See E. D. Reeder, “The Mother of the Gods and a Hellenistic Bronze Matrix,” American Journal of Archaeology 91.3 (1987): 423-40.
5. See id., “Antiquités syriennes,” Syria 36.1-2 (1959): 38-89, esp. 57-58, pl. 11.3-4.
6. See Treister 2001 (supra 1). See also the representation of an Archigallus (high priest) of Cybele, wearing a wreath decorated by circular medallions and a relief-plaque pendant in LIMC Kybele no. 130.
Lisa M. Anderson
