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...

While looking through my images of artifacts in the British Museum this morning, I came across this terracotta figurine from Boeotia dated to around 400 BCE.  It is identified as merely a youth crowned with a wreath holding a puppy while another dog stands beside him.  As I studied the image, though, I wondered about the identification of it as just a youth.  The broad hips and thighs are reflective of a female form although it is clearly male.  I wondered if it may be a type of Aphroditus statue.  The deity is thought to have arrived in Athens from Cyprus in the 4th century BCE although there have been some Aphroditus herms dated to the 5th century BCE.  Aphroditus was later renamed  Hermaphroditos to reflect its parentage from Aphrodite and Hermes. The deity makes an appearance in the work, On Moral Characters, penned by Theophrastus.  A native of the island of Lesbos, Theophrastus succeeded Aristotle in the Peripatetic school. His given name wa...