Statue of a woman

Roman art

This small statue in patinated bronze portrays a female figure wearing a high-girdled sleeveless tunic bloused at the waist. The garment falls in deep vertical folds down the lower part of the body. The arms, which have no hands, are raised and bent at the elbow. The figure’s thick locks of hair, parted above the forehead, are crowned by a diadem in the shape of a moon. It is probably a dancing figure that, however, departs from the iconographic type known for its marked static nature.

During the eighteenth century, the goldsmith Luigi Valadier restored this small bronze and used it and three others like it to decorate a long gilt frame, alternated with three small painted panels. There is a group of small bronzes in the Borghese Collection, similar to one another but different in subject, that were also attached to frames and are currently preserved in the Palazzina’s storerooms. This miniature bronze is datable to between the first and second centuries CE. 

Object details

Commentary

This statuette, which is not found in the inventories or bibliography relative to the Borghese archaeological collection, is part of a group of very small bronzes of various subject preserved in the Palazzina’s storerooms. A receipt dated 1773 and discovered by González-Palacios describes the restoration work carried out by the goldsmith Luigi Valadier at the end of the eighteenth century ‘su alcune figurine accomodate’(‘on a few repaired figurines’), which Minozzi recognised in 2019 as the Borghese bronzes (1993, pp. 37, 50). The receipt, which describes filling in missing parts and attaching the figurines to gilt wooden panels of various shape, led the author to attribute the frames to Valadier (2019, pp. 192–195). The figurine of a woman was used, along with three others (inv. CCXCIX, CCCII, CCC), as a decorative element to separate small paintings on a long frame that probably corresponds to one mentioned in an old text: ‘Per aver affermato quattro figurine antiche sopra una tavola longa dorata avendo in tutto fatto la med.ma fattura de sud.i già descritti bustini’ (‘For having attached four ancient figurines to a long gilt panel of the same workmanship as the small busts described above’; Archivio Apostolico Vaticano, Archivio Borghese 5294). EDXRF analysis of the statuette for the exhibition Valadier. Splendore nella Roma del Settecento, held at the Galleria Borghese in 2019, confirmed their authenticity and identified the material as ternary bronze covered with a painted patina. 

The small bronze portrays a female figure moving slightly to the right. Her weight is supported by her right leg while the left is bent and moved slightly forward. Her right arm is outstretched to the side and held downward, elbow bent, while the left is held upward, elbow also bent, with the forearm held outward. Both hands are lost. The figure is wearing a long, sleeveless chiton with a raised v-neckline. The garment is cinched below the breasts and also has a draped fold called an apoptygma that falls around her hips. The drapery covering the lower part of the body is rendered in deep parallel folds that shift to the left with the forward movement of the left leg. The figure’s head is turned to the right, her hair is gathered into bipartite locks, and she wears a moon-shaped crown. The surface of her face is heavily abraded, and her features are roughly defined and vague, with eye sockets emphasised by a deep incision and small lips. The statuette would seem to be a miniature version of the iconographic type of a dancer with raised arms in which the lower part of the figure’s garment is gently shifted by the movement. Compared to similar statuettes of dancers, examples including one in the Museo Archeologico, Aquileia (Ghedini 2019, pp. 237–250) and one unearthed at Hadrian’s Villa (Morpurgo 1930, pp. 178–213), this one seems, however, less dynamic and the torsion of the body is less sinuous. Based on stylistic analysis, the sculpture seems to be datable to between the first and second centuries CE.

Giulia Ciccarello