Herodios grave relief

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The Herodios relief is a grave relief for a young deceased on a Cycladic arched stele . The work of art is in the antique collection in Wilhelmshöhe Palace in Kassel and bears the inventory number Sk 144.

description

The relief stele is made of white, finely crystalline marble with a red-brown patina. There were remains of iron pins in the stone. It is 116 centimeters high and 48.5 centimeters wide at the bottom. The width at the height of the architrave is only 45 centimeters. The image field is 62 centimeters high and 33 centimeters wide, the arch has a clear height of 11.5 centimeters. The relief is 4.5 centimeters deep in the most pronounced places. The left hand of the figure shown, in which it is holding a ball , protrudes 2.5 centimeters at the outermost point over the ante that delimit the field of view.

The front of the stele was worked with pointed and toothed iron, whereby only the surface of the carved figure was smoothed. The reverse shows rough chiselling. In the corners above the rosettes on the front, on the side under the anticapitals and in the figure's right hand, there were remains of rusted iron dowels or pins that had blown the stone. They were probably once used to hang up devotional objects and were removed when the relief was added to the Kassel collection. The stone was then put back together. Otherwise it shows no major damage and no traces of fundamental changes in the relief in antiquity.

The relief shows a high stele base and tapering side walls. A three-faceted arch rests on the ante capitals . The arched field is framed by a bar on the sides and on top, in each of the corners there is a bowl-shaped rosette with a pistil or omphalos . The upper end of the stele is formed by a gable with protruding cornices, on which acrotere are carved outlines . A six-leaf, bowl-shaped rosette with a pistil or omphalos with a central bore adorns the tympanum . The architrave bears a two-line inscription.

The field of view shows a boy or young man standing in counter post , who is depicted almost frontally. His face under a suggested short curly or wavy hairstyle is turned slightly to the right, he seems to be looking downwards at a dog sitting on the floor next to his right foot. His upper arms rest on the upper body. His himation falls over his left shoulder and is wrapped around his hips, one end of the hips lies over the left arm, which the sitter has bent at the elbow so that the left forearm can be seen from the front and the left hand holding the ball rests, protrudes beyond the other dimensions of the stone. The himation covers the right leg of the standing person to below the knee. The left leg, the free leg, is bare from the knee. Next to this left leg, the other end of the himation, adorned with a tassel, hangs down low. Arch and pull folds of the himation allow the body lines to shine through. The youth's right hand is stretched a little to the right. Originally there was apparently an object attached with an iron pin in this hand. Below is the very flat figure of the sitting dog, which stretches its snout towards the young man's right hand and holds its right front paw raised. The young man wears sandals on his feet.

The hairstyle, the round face and the body shape suggest that the deceased was around twelve to 15 years old. The inscription gives no information about this. It is:

Ηρωδηος τον εαυτου υον

ηρωα

("Herodios (has) set up his son,

the heroes (deceased) ".)

However, this inscription is not the original inscription on the stone: on the lower right-hand edge of the writing surface, remnants of the once smooth and higher surface of the architrave have been preserved, on which sparse remains of letters can be guessed, which indicate an older inscription. The Herodios inscription, on the other hand, is located on a recessed and unsmoothed surface. It is only sketchily executed and in italics, which indicates a production in the 3rd or 4th century AD. The spelling of the name Ηρωδηος with Eta and the fact that the sigma is turned to the left also fits . However, the relief work is likely to be significantly older than this second inscription.

Classification and dating

The arched stele has been the main form of monument in the Cyclades area since the Hellenistic period. Attic Naïskos steles show the one-figure image of Palestrites in its typical form from the late classical period ; In the Aegean-East Greek area, independent regional figure types developed during the Hellenistic-Roman epoch. Depending on the age, the deceased was depicted as a pais with play animals and / or toys, as is also the case on the present stele, or as a Palestrite with school attributes that indicated physical and mental education, or as an ephebe in a costume and with attributes which already related to the adult life of a working citizen.

Peter Gercke describes the depiction of the deceased on the Herodios relief as “almost polycletic ” and continues: “The plump face and the spherical head shape indicate a childlike, boyish age. The well-behaved dog, snout and one paw stretching up, suggests that his master was training; in this the older Palestrite or Ephebe differs from the stelae with boys who are jumped at by their little dogs. The ball game was popular with Paides, Palestrites and Ephebees. ”Gercke points out that the unusual way of wearing the himation with the many exposed parts of the body is reminiscent of divinized figures in the Jupiter type of the early Roman imperial era , but believes that it is more likely - despite the "Hero's inscription" - an age-specific youthful habitus should be indicated. He does not know of any other depictions of garments with the same motif in other Palestinian paintings, but for the time when the relief was created, with its classical figure scheme, he stipulates the period from the first pre-Christian to the second post-Christian century. According to Gercke, the fact that shaving and the application of the younger inscription occurred in the third or fourth century AD could have been due to the stone's good reusability due to its size and the representative relief representation.

history

The history of finding the relief is not well documented. Allegedly it comes from the Cyclades, possibly from the island of Naxos or Paros . In 1992 it came from the Laux Collection in Paris to the Frankfurt art trade and was acquired there for the Kassler Antikensammlung. The stone, which had broken into five parts, was cleaned in 1992/93 and freed from the iron dowels that had blown it up. In 2001 a suspension was also installed.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Peter Gercke, Nina Zimmermann-Elseify : Antique sculptures. Collection of Antiquities Museum Landscape Hessen Kassel. Philipp von Zabern, Mainz 2007, ISBN 978-3-8053-3781-6 , pp. 345–347, here p. 345.