Relief by Vertault
The Vertault relief is a Roman relief from Vertault , the ancient Vertillum , in the Côte-d'Or department . It is now in the museum of Châtillon-sur-Seine .
description
The 39 cm high limestone relief shows three female figures sitting on a bench, uniformly dressed and dressed up: They wear long robes and closed shoes. The right breast is bare and the bare right upper arm is adorned with a circlet. While the two outer figures, who also show the same hairstyle, look straight ahead, the middle one has her head turned slightly to the side.
The figure on the left of the viewer has crossed its legs and is holding a swaddling child on its lap, whose head rests on its left forearm, while its right hand rests on the wrapped legs of the baby. The woman in the middle seems to be rolling a piece of cloth, perhaps a diaper, on both sides of her lap, while the woman on the right is holding a small bowl in her right hand and a large-pored sponge in her left. A cloth appears to be spread out on her lap.
Attempts at interpretation
The attributes of the women can be interpreted as preparation for washing and wrapping of the child, as also Paul-Marie Duval explained that this Matres (matrons) "really maternal tasks meet" and "the one on her knees a [...] Child, the second spreads a diaper and the third holds a jar and a sponge ”. The group is interpreted similarly in a work that connects the representations of this type found in France and England with the cult of the Nutrices in Poetovio and comparable phenomena in other ancient religions.
On the other hand, a further interpretation attaches a somewhat different religious meaning to the objects of daily use in the hands of the female figures and explains the supposed piece of fabric that the central figure is holding in her hands as a roll of parchment . The bowl of the third party, which in fact appears unsuitable for washing due to its size, is interpreted as a vessel for a libation. The deliberations end with the question of whether the deities could possibly be Moiren or Parzen that determine the lifelessness of the small child. It should also be noted that similar groups, such as those of Bolards / Nuits-Saint-Georges in the Museum of Dijon or the relief of Saint-Boil in the Museum of Chalon-sur-Saône , are equipped with scales , a very symbolic instrument are. This distinguishes these groups from the inscribed Matres groups like that in the Musée de Fourvière in Lyon , which probably once adorned a lararium and was supposed to guarantee fertility, prosperity and family happiness. In addition to the scales, the relief by Nuits-Saint-Georges also has other elements that are missing from the otherwise similar relief by Vertault: Cornu copiae , the bow and rudder of a boat and a kind of globe. These elements seem to point to Fatum and Fortuna , the overall representation can then be interpreted as a journey of man through life to death - if possible happy. It is also possible that the representation on the reliefs was deliberately kept ambivalent: "[...] this motif may be an instance of deliberate ambiguity: napkin and scroll are similar visual images, and the iconography is probably interpretable at a number of levels; human fertility at one, the message of life and death at another [...] ".
literature
- Émile Espérandieu : Recueil général des bas-reliefs de la Gaule romaine. Vol. 4, Paris 1911, p. 336 No. 3377 (full text) .
- Simone Deyts: Images des Dieux de la Gaule. (= Collection des Hesperides. ) Editions Errance, Paris, 1992, ISBN 2-87772-067-5 , pp. 64-65.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Paul Marie Duval, quoted after the article Matres in: Lexikon der Alten Welt. Volume 2, licensed edition for Weltbild Verlag, Augsburg 1994, ISBN 3-89350-960-7 , p. 1869.
- ^ Noemie Beck: Goddesses in Celtic Religion. Université Lumière Lyon 2, Lyon 2009, Chapter 1: The Matres and Matronae: The Nursing Mothers or Nutrices. (without page numbers ; doctoral thesis; side view in theses.univ-lyon2.fr ).
- ↑ Attempted interpretation: Soins au nouveau-né: Matres de Vertault. ( Memento of September 21, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) In: Antiquitas. Virtuel Suisse Campus, undated, accessed on September 20, 2013 (French).
- ↑ Miranda Aldhouse-Green: Women and Goddesses in the Celtic World. In: Steven J. Sutcliffe (Ed.): Religion: Empirical Studies. A Collection to Mark the 50th Anniversary of the British Association for the Study of Religions. Ashgate Publishing, Burlington 2004, ISBN 0-7546-4158-9 , pp. 149–164, here p. 160 (English; view of quotations in the Google Book Search ).