Published Catalogue Text: Stone Sculptures: The Greek, Roman and Etruscan Collections of the Harvard University Art Museums , written 1990
121
Front and side of an Attic Sarcophagus
There are five sections, with pieces missing at the breaks. They run from the left end to the left front edge (or about so, with a section cut away), to the turn of the corner at the right front. The slabs look as if they has been cut and broken apart for use, face down, as paving stones. The visible surfaces are fresh, save where there is chipping.
The scene shows a battle between the Greeks and the Amazons. Sarcophagi with scenes of combat between Amazons and Greeks were carved in Italy, Asia Minor, and Attica. Those created around the quarries near Athens were the most satisfying in terms of classical Greek sculptures because, as especially here, they reflect the ideal scenes of combat going back to the Parthenon metopes, passing the era of the Bassae frieze with its Lapiths and Centaurs, and culminating in the friezes of the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus. Amazons were remembered for campaigns in Phrygia, Lycia, and an attack on Theseus at Athens, but the presence of Achilles and the dying Amazon Queen Penthesilea in Roman Amazonomachies suggest the focus was on the battle at Troy, when, late in the war, the Amazons came to aid their cousins Priam and the Trojans.
A sarcophagus such as the Forbes-Gould-Harvard example, which once had a pedimented, temple-roof-shaped lid, would have appealed to a client in western Asia Minor because of its strongly Pheidian to Skopasian flavor. The combats could be thought of as symbolic of life's trials or the ravages of death (many other mythological sarcophagi combined similar themes). Otherwise, the Amazonomachy may have appealed to those persons, in Ionia or Italy, who cherished scenes from the Trojan War and, here, myths in which the Trojan ancestors of the Romans or their exotic allies were prominent.
While looking back to Athens in the fourth century B.C. in passages and specific details, this composition (the long side) with its crowded upper background, its foreshortened casualties in the bottom register, and its elongated combatants in the central area from end to end also looks ahead to Late Antique battle sarcophagi (the Ludovisi Sarcophagus in the Museo Nazionale Romano) when such unclassical elements will mark the beginning of the end of ancient art.
Cornelius Vermeule and Amy Brauer
