Antiquities Exhibits

 The Romans favored bronze and marble above all else for their finest work and loved miniatures.  By the mid-1st century CE, Roman sculptors began to move away from emulating their Etruscan and Greek predecessors and sought to capture and create optical effects of light and shade for greater realism.  This trend may well have developed from the tradition of keeping realistic wax funeral masks of deceased family members in the ancestral home.  Although few bronze examples have survived due to a high demand for reuse of the alloy, those that did, like this poignant figurine, portrayed a people who were realistically scarred, wrinkled, or plump, like this healthy-appearing little girl. Sadly (from my viewpoint anyway), towards the end of the Empire, the influence of art from the eastern Mediterranean resulted in figural sculpture with enlarged heads, vacantly staring eyes, and out-of-proportion torsos and limbs such as those seen in works portraying the emperor Constant...

The subject of this group with one person carrying another has a long history in Greek art. It is thought to illustrate a game called ephedrismos. A stone was placed upright on the ground, and balls or pebbles were thrown at it from a distance. The loser's eyes were covered, and he had to carry the other player on his back until he found and touched the stone. There were probably a number of variations. Here the little girl carries her companion but does not have her eyes covered. Image: Terracotta group of two girls playing a game known as ephedrismos late 4th–early 3rd century B.C.E. Greek, Corinthian at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York courtesy of the museum.