Sarcophagus with Marine Thiasos

Roman art

The long side of this sarcophagus is decorated with a marine thiasos, in the centre of which is a portrait bust of the deceased inside a round shell. The complex marine procession is arranged symmetrically to the sides, covering the entire surface and composed of pairs of ichthyocentaurs with Nereids and numerous winged putti.

The sculpture, which was depicted in a drawing by Cassiano Dal Pozzo in the seventeenth century, was in the fourth room of the Villa Borghese in 1832 and in its current location in 1841.

The iconographic motif of the marine thiasos became popular in Roman funerary art, specifically sarcophagus decoration, in the late Antonine period. The hairstyle worn by the deceased, which is similar to that in depictions of Orbiana, wife of Emperor Alexander Severus, suggests a date during the first half of the third century CE.

Object details

Commentary

This decorated panel, which is the front of a fully preserved sarcophagus, was depicted in a drawing by Cassiano Dal Pozzo in the early seventeenth century (Vermeule 1966, p. 41, fol. 54, no. 8608). In the Villa Borghese, Nibby mentioned it in the fourth room in 1832 and then in its current location in 1841 (p. 115, no. 8; p. 922, no. 13).

The relief is of a symmetrically arranged marine thiasos, in the middle of which is a large round shell held up by two ichthyocentaurs. The creatures have thick, clearly defined locks of hair and seem to be turned, with the slight twist of their torsos and heads, towards the two Nereids sitting on their backs The goddesses are nude with the exception of the drapery that billows up over their heads (a stylistic device called velificatio) to then drape over a leg. At each end of the panel, there is a pair composed of a Nereid and an ichthyocentaur. The putti are used to fill in every blank spot in the scene, in a kind of horror vacui.Beneath the shell, there is an anguiped creature hitting a sea monster called a ketos on the right, which Rumpf identified as Scylla, the unfortunate nymph who a jealous Circe turned into a terrible monster (Ovid, Metamorphoses 13-14). In the middle of the shell, there is a portrait bust of the deceased, who is wearing a chiton and a himation arranged to form an arc. 

The theme of the marine procession in a continuous frieze with a central motif first appeared on Roman sarcophagi in the second quarter of the second century CE. At first, the central image was of Oceanus (as we see in a similar sarcophagus in the Borghese Collection, inv. LXXXVII), which was then replaced in the early third century by the imago of the deceased in a clipeus, which was often in the shape of a shell, surrounded by the symmetrically arranged figures of the procession. The meaning of the marine thiasos in relation to the image of the deceased has been widely debated. In the seventeenth century, Buonarroti interpreted it as a procession of mythical beings who accompany the soul of the deceased to the afterlife: ‘In molti sepolcri scolpirono de’ geni marini per corteggio delle anime, che andavano agli Elisi’ (‘many sarcophagi are sculpted with marine spirits to accompany the souls who were going to Elysium’; p. 44). This theory was accepted by many scholars, including Cumont in 1942 and Brandenburg in 1967 (p. 166; p. 195). Rumpf departed from the theory of eschatological meaning, imagining a purely decorative function, based on the presumed absence of literary and epigraphic documentation to corroborate the interpretation, besides the use of the iconographic theme in non-funerary contexts (1939, pp. 131–132). According to other scholars, the subject was steeped in hedonistic messages, visually circulated through images of joy, nudity and eroticism, arguing that the presence of the Meerwesen on the sarcophagi alludes to the atemporal blessedness of the afterworld (Sichtermann 1970a, pp. 214–215; Sichtermann 1970b, pp. 236–238; Zanker, Ewald 2004, pp. 117–119, 132–134).

Both theories can in fact be considered, with the images of the marine thiasos on sarcophagi evoking all the multiple semantic facets of the chthonic world, from the ones relative to the call to an idyllic afterworld to those relative to ‘death by water’, understood as the symbolic journey of the soul to the Isles of the Blessed (Sichtermann 1963, p. 422; Quartino 1987, p. 52; Zanker, Ewald 2004, p. 133). 

The hair of the deceased portrayed on the Borghese sarcophagus, parted in the middle and arranged in regular, wavy, slightly puffy locks, seems similar to that of Orbiana, wife of Alexander Severus and Augusta from 225 to 229, as depicted in a portrait head in the Louvre (Kersauson 1996, pp. 426–427, no. 197). This link would provide a terminus post quem for the relief and confirm Rumpf’s theory dating it to the third century CE (1939, p. 29, no. 74, pl. 24).

Giulia Ciccarello