Peplophoros

The statue’s weight is on the left leg, while the right is bent and positioned forward; the figure is wearing a doric peplos (hence the name peplophoros) closed at the side and on the shoulders and cinched above the hips by a belt: the peplos falls smoothly on the chest and the back, while only just visible under the smooth edging of the apoptygma (the fold of the peplos), are the small pleats of the kolpos (tuck) created by the belt. In the lower part of the body the drape pattern becomes complicated with thick pleats, which convey the sense of the heaviness of the fabric, with folds that are parallel to one another and rigid like the ridges of a Doric column; the stiff verticality is interrupted by the outline of the right leg that emerges at knee-height under the garment. Little remains of the original arms, nor can we establish precisely their position, however, it is likely that one or both were held out in the act of offering. The Ionic-Attic influences on the softness of the fabric, on the free leg, and on the head are noteworthy. The head was worked separately and the characteristics of the face, with its oval and hair recall the Attic ambit.

The ponderation of our peplophoros statue characterises also the Copenhagen type, from the eponymous acephalous example held at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek (inv. 433) and known through a few copies such as that from Rione Terra (Baia, Castello Aragonese inv. 292863). It is possible, as has been speculated, that this type was exhibited as a pair with the statue with the opposite ponderation named Candia-Ludovisi (on this type see Tölle-Kastenbein 1986, pp. 15-32), a replica of a classic Greek work, as the discovery of two copies near the Horti Sallustiani in Rome would prove, where also a third example currently in Boston was discovered.

The discovery of peplophoroi in groups is attested, for instance, by the two sculptures from the Castel S. Angelo area, today in the National Roman Museum (Paribeni 1979, nn. 34-35, pp. 37-38), by the four from the Augustan complex of Rione Terra at Pozzuoli (Valeri 2005, pp. 68-77) and by the five bronze peplophoroi of Neo-Attic manufacture from Villa of the Papyri in Ercolano (Mattusch 2005, pp. 195-215). The numerous known replicas testify to the great good fortune that this iconographic type met in the sculpture workshops in the Roman era, above all in the early Julio-Claudian era, in which we can place the Borghese statue, and later in the Hadrian era, when the Attic models of the late-Severe style were recovered.

Jessica Clementi