Warren Cup

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Fig. 1: A younger man sits down on his older lover's lap.
Fig. 2: Two male adolescents making love.
Fig. 3: A younger man, presumably a slave, observes the scene, half hidden behind a door.

The Warren Cup or Warren beaker is a silver goblet decorated with homoerotic motifs , which is said to have been created in the decades around the turn of the times in the Roman Empire . The drinking cup is named after its first known modern owner, the American collector and art lover Edward Perry Warren (1860–1928). The British Museum in London has owned the Warren Cup since 1999 .

Emergence

According to the British Museum, the Warren goblet was believed to have been made between 15 BC. and 15 AD, made in the east of the Roman Empire. It was probably made on behalf of wealthy members of the Greek community in one of the larger cities of the Levant . The Warren Cup is considered to be one of the rare surviving remains of Roman silversmithing from this period; among the remains that have been preserved, he is of exceptional “craftsmanship”.

Appearance

The Warren goblet is 11 cm high, has a maximum width of 9.9 cm and stands on a delicate base. The two original handles were lost. The silversmith's work itself is pushed forward from the inside like a relief .

Two homoerotic love scenes are shown in a lavishly furnished private house (sofas, curtains, a lyre and aulos (pipes) on the walls) as well as the observer of these scenes: One motif (Fig. 1) shows a younger man on the lap of a bearded, older man, the younger one is holding onto a rope. On the second motif (Fig. 2) two male lovers are shown in close embrace; The curls of hair that reach down to the back show that they are both youthful. The nakedness of the lovers is contrasted by the only clothed figure on the mug (Fig. 3), probably a slave, he watches the love scenes through the half-open door.

The setting of the scenery and the physical characteristics (hairstyle) of the protagonists do not depict the present of the Augustan period, but rather the past of ancient Greece a few centuries earlier. The locks of hair on young men are signs that they are freeborn; Greek outdoors, the long locks were cut off between the ages of 16 and 18 and dedicated to a deity.

History of the Warren Cup in Modern Times

The silver cup was allegedly excavated at Bittir , a town southwest of Jerusalem , along with coins from the time of Emperor Claudius . Edward Warren bought it from a dealer in Rome in 1911. After Warren's death in 1928, it was impossible for decades to sell the cup because of the explicit scenes on it, which were obviously found to be extremely offensive; the British Museum, for example, declined the purchase, as did the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge . When the British Museum decided to buy it in 1999, it had to pay a multiple of the amount previously requested: with a purchase price of 1.8 million pounds, the Warren Cup was the museum's most expensive single acquisition to date.

The Warren Cup was presented in 2010 as the 36th item in the radio project A History of the World in 100 Objects by the British broadcaster BBC Radio 4 and the British Museum.

Scientific controversy over authenticity

A scientific controversy arose at the beginning of the 21st century about the authenticity of the silver mug. As early as 2008, the Italian archaeologist Maria Teresa Marabini Moevs published doubts about the authenticity of the silver cup. In 2013 she renewed the falsification allegation in a revised and significantly expanded version of her article. In the same year, the archaeologist Luca Giuliani argued that the goblet was a fake that had been specially made for the openly homosexual Warren. He concluded this for several reasons: The fact that the two lovers do not look at each other is unusual for erotic depictions of antiquity, as is the depiction of the penetrated anus . Since homosexuality was only tolerated as pederasty in the Roman Empire , it would have been expected on an ancient representation that the age difference between the active and the passive part would have been more clearly emphasized. After all, openly erotic scenes were often found on ceramics, but when it came to precious materials like silver, the artists always kept to a conservative pictorial program.

In 2015 Giuliani retracted his doubts and confirmed the authenticity of the mug; In addition to iconographic considerations, the decisive factor was that a silver chloride patina caused by corrosion could be detected on the inner wall of the cup, which cannot be artificially produced.

literature

Web links

Commons : Warren Cup  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Remarks

  1. ↑ Inventory number: 1999,0426.1.
  2. ↑ Dating and explanation from British Museum, Collection Database, 1999,0426.1 ; accessed May 23, 2019.
  3. ↑ MacGregor 2011, p. 286.
  4. ↑ MacGregor 2011, pp. 284-285.
  5. ↑ Williams 2006, p. 5.
  6. ↑ MacGregor 2011, pp. 286-287.
  7. ^ MacGregor 2011, pp. 281 ff., Website of the BBC , website of the British Museum ; both accessed January 31, 2019.
  8. ^ Maria Teresa Marabini Moevs: Per una storia del gusto: riconsiderazioni sul Calice Warren , in: Bollettino d'Arte 146, 2008, pp. 1–16 ( abstract online ; accessed May 23, 2019).
  9. ^ Maria Teresa Marabini Moevs: The Warren Chalice in the Imagination of Its Creator and as a Reflection of His Time , in: Bullettino Della Commissione Archeologica Comunale Di Roma 114, 2013, pp. 157-184.
  10. ↑ Abstract: Luca Giuliani: Wrong sex . In Die Zeit , 34 of August 15, 2013, p. 54 (web link accessed October 11, 2014); extended version A goblet for Mr. Warren. In Zeitschrift für Ideengeschichte VII, 3, 2013, pp. 77–92.
  11. ↑ Luca Giuliani, The Warren Goblet in the British Museum. A revision . In: Zeitschrift für Ideengeschichte IX, 3, 2015, pp. 89–110.