Funerary relief with three figures

Roman art

The relief came from the collection of Villa Montalto Peretti and was purchased together with other works at the end of the 18th century. It was placed against the semicircular wall of the Giardino del Lago, near the Grotta dei Leoni until the new reorganisation of the collection in the Casino in the 1830s. The relief, set in a modern frame, consists of three full-length standing figures: a matron at the centre and a male figure on each side of her, one with a mature face (from a restoration), the other young, in a long toga, the attire of the Roman citizen. The female figure is wrapped in a cloak and veil, reproducing the Pudicitia type of statuary, which embodied the values of chastity, modesty and demureness appropriate to the Roman matron. The relief was made to decorate the exterior façade of a funerary monument, according to a practice frequently used in Rome from the late Republican age onwards, although it is much rarer to find a representation of the deceased as a full-length figure.

Object details

Commentary

The funerary relief still belonged to the collection of Villa Montalto Peretti at the end of the 17th century, as documented by a drawing in the Eton Library (Barberini 1991). At the end of the 18th century, Marcantonio IV, through the mediation of Vincenzo Pacetti, purchased several works from the collection to decorate the Giardino del Lago at the Villa Pinciana; a drawing by Charles Percier from Paris (1786-1791) and a sketch by Bertel Thorvaldsen (1796) confirm the presence of the relief, leaning against the semicircular wall of the Garden, in correspondence with the Grotta dei Leoni [Grotto of the Lions] (Di Gaddo 1997; Helsted 1965). In January 1827, the relief was entrusted to Antonio D'Este for restoration. It was later placed in Room VI, on the occasion of the new layout of the collection commissioned by Camillo Borghese in the Casino, a collection that had been depleted by the sale of antique works to his brother-in-law Napoleon Bonaparte.

The funerary relief, set in a modern frame, shows three full-length standing figures: in the centre is a matron, at the sides two male figures, one with a mature face (from a restoration), the other with a youthful face, wearing a long toga with ample drapery, diagonal folds on the chest and thicker folds at the neckline. Although it does not provide absolute chronological information, the type of toga worn by the two figures recalls the attire of the togate figures depicted in the Ara Pacis in Rome (12-9 BCE).

The attitude of the female figure – wrapped in the cloak and veiled, with the left arm bent across the torso horizontally, and the right arm raised with the right elbow resting on the left hand, while the right hand, clasping a flap of the cloak, touches her right cheek with bent fingers – is characteristic of the Pudicitia type of statuary (Bieber 1977, pp. 607, 612-613, 615-622). This type, popular in the Hellenistic Greek world and frequently found in the Roman world, particularly in funerary statuary, embodied the values of chastity, modesty and demureness appropriate to the Roman matron.

The production of reliefs for decorating the exterior facades of tombs began in Rome in the late Republican age. There are two known types, the rectangular, longitudinal relief with the deceased shown in full-length (such as the one in question) and the quadrangular, transversal relief, which limits the depiction to the bust; both were mainly made of Luni marble. The first type, full-length, is of better quality and less common (Kleiner 1977, pp. 47-49, 51, nos. 1, 8, 11-13, 37, 64-66), mostly found in Rome and Capua (Frederiksen 1984, pp. 264 f.; 286; 308 f.; 320; 323). In general, there are frequently depictions of a married couple, to which children may be added either between the parents or at their sides (Kockel 1993, pp. 110-111, cat. D 6, plate 24 a-b), while it is rare to find depictions of two togate men (Kockel 1993, pp. 95-96, cat. B 2, plates 10 b, 11 a-b), two women (Kockel 1993, p. 222, cat. O 29, plate 132 a. c.) or, as in this case, two togate men and a woman in the centre. Finally, the figures are frequently life-size, in accordance with a direct relationship between the size of the funerary monument and the tangible portrayal of the social rank and economic prosperity achieved by the clients (Zanker, Ewald 2008, pp. 181-182).

The analysis of the male and female clothing, both of which can be compared to a relief in the Doria collection (Kockel 1993, pp. 152-153, cat. I 8), and, in particular, the precise references to the togate figures depicted on the Ara Pacis, allow the Borghese work to be dated to the last two decades of the 1st century BCE.

Jessica Clementi