Sarcophagus with Battle between Romans and Barbarians

Roman art

This sarcophagus was depicted in the early sixteenth century in the portico of St Peter’s in two drawings by Amico Aspertini and Giulio Romano. It was documented in the Palazzina Borghese for the first time in 1832, in its current location. It is a funerary monument decorated on the front with reliefs of a battle between Romans and Barbarians and shares similarities with a series of known ‘battle’ sarcophagi.

The scene unfolds on two perspectival planes and is closed on either side with reliefs of trophies and two barbarian couples. The Roman soldiers are wearing cuirasses and are all attacking on horseback, while the barbarians, nude or wearing a tunic and bracae, are either dying or trying to escape.

The sculpture is comparable to the reliefs on the Column of Marcus Aurelius or, at the latest, the Arch of Septimius Severus, as suggested by Nibby, and can therefore be dated to the end of the second century CE.

Object details

Commentary

The front of this sarcophagus is decorated with a battle between Romans and barbarians, framed by trophies and two similarly dressed and posed barbarian couples. The male figure on the left has his right arm folded on his chest and the left slightly bent and held in front of the body, while the man on the opposite side has both hands crossed over his belly. Both men wear a tunic, wide soft, wide trousers called bracae and a mantle of Gallic origin called a sagum. They also wear caligae on their feet, a sandal made up of interwoven strips of leather, although only those of the figure on the left are preserved. The two women have long, curly hair held with a taenia and are looking at their companions. They are wearing long, high-girdled tunics gathered up around their hips and a mantle fastened with a flower-shaped fibula on their chests. The woman on the left has her hands folded over her belly, while the one on the right, missing her right arm, brings her left arm to her chest. There is a decorated helmet with a short crest on the ground between the two figures.

The trophies, each of which is placed on two groups of four spears each, are made of poles in the form of a cross and wearing a tunic and weapons. The circular shields are embossed with a gorgon’s head, the one on the left inscribed in a curved octagon and the one on the right surrounded by plant spirals.

The scene starts in the middle of the panel with the general on a horse, wearing an animal skin. The other figures are arranged around him. The general is wearing a muscled cuirass with shoulder plates and decorated with rows of pteryges and historiated motifs. His mantle is fastened at his neck and blows in the wind to form a velificatio. His right arm, which is lost, must have been raised. Two Roman soldiers on foot are wearing the same clothing, in simplified form. One is standing next to the leader; the other is in the foreground, holding a barbarian by the hair.  Behind the leader’s mantle and partly covered by it, there is a Roman soldier on horseback, wearing a scaled cuirass and a length of protective fabric called a focale around his neck. At upper left, at the top of the composition, there is a knight wearing a helmet with a visor, cheek protector, neck protector and a small fan-shaped crest decorated with a scroll motif. The soldier is brandishing his gladius at two barbarians on horseback trying to escape, looking backward, terrorised, at their assailant. The first is wearing a sleeved tunic over a mantle called a sagum, fastened over his right shoulder with a circular fibula; the second is wearing a long-sleeved tunic. Continuing along the top of the scene, at upper right there is a knight between two emblems: an eagle with spread wings and a fabric standard. On the sides, two Roman soldiers burst onto the scene. The one on the left is richly clothed wearing a scaled lorica, a focale, bracae and a balteus. The one on the right is wearing a simple chiton. There is a body of a wounded barbarian beneath the hooves of each horse. The knight on the left is fighting a standing barbarian shown from the back and wearing a short tunic and bracae, and holding a hexagonal shield decorated with plant spirals. A barbarian kneeling on the ground in the foreground is defending himself from the emperor’s attack with a shield decorated with snouts. There are dying barbarians on the ground around him.

The sarcophagus was documented in the early sixteenth century in the Portico of St Peter’s, where it was drawn by Amico Aspertini between 1500 and 1503 and by Giulio Romano in 1515 (Schweikhart 1986, pp. 35, 75, figs 14, 79). In 1828, the sculpture was listed among the items from the Lante estate that passed to Camillo Borghese (Moreno, Sforzini 1987, p. 363).Nibby, who recorded it in the Portico of the Villa in 1832, noted its resemblance to the reliefs on the Arch of Septimius Severus in the Roman Forum, and imagined that the sarcophagus might have belonged to a soldier who fought in the campaigns during that period, linked to the emperor (pp. 22–24). Reinach, author of an exhaustive study of sarcophagi with battles between Romans and barbarians, compared the Borghese sarcophagus with a similar one on Ammendola (1889, p. 329). In 1935, Rodenwaldt wrote that the Borghese sculpture was a mature expression of battle scenes inspired by triumphal painting and datable to Marcus Aurelius’s military campaigns (p. 26). In a subsequent publication on the development of Roman art in the third century CE, he dated the Borghese sculpture to the Severan period (1936, p. 90, no. 7). Hamberg, who was one of the first to closely study the relief, underlined the crude realism of the clashes and the opposition between the disciplined, composed Roman ranks and the wild, passionate barbarians. He dated the Borghese sarcophagus to the second century CE, a chronology also embraced by Andreae (1945, pp. 179–181; 1956, pp. 16, 31–32). Schäfer, who wrote a long essay on the relief, included it in the ‘Massenkampfsarkophage’ group dated to the early third century CE and noted that the scene portrayed an unreal or imagined situation, untraceable to a historical event. He also disagreed with Andreae’s theory that the general was the main figure, identifying him instead as the knight opposite. This figure, the head and right arm of which are missing, is wearing scaled armour without pteryges, a mantle draped over his shoulder, bracae and, on his feet, caligae. The scholar also noted that, in front of the figure identified as the deceased, there is a large helmet decorated with three stems and flat ram’s horns, which he identified as the aretè, the Virtus of the subject. The iconography of a helmet brought by a servant is found in many other reliefs, including a sarcophagus in the Pamphili Collection, in which the personification of the Virtus offers the helmet to the general (1979, pp. 355–382).

There are a number of sarcophagi with a similar style and compositional handling of the same subject, including the ‘Portonaccio Sarcophagus’ now in the Museo Nazionale Romano and another sarcophagus in the Pamphili Collection, both of which were modelled on the reliefs on the Column of Marcus Aurelius (which was in turn tied to the celebrations held in honour of the dead emperor) and datable to the end of the second century, the period to which the Borghese relief can also be traced (Musso 1985, p. 186; Calza 1977, pp. 201–203).

Giulia Ciccarello