Statue of a Woman Making an Offering

Roman art

This small patinated bronze statuette portrays a female figure wearing a sleeveless tunic and a mantle that passes over her left shoulder and around her waist, from where it is draped over her left arm. She holds out a small ritual tray called a patera in her right hand and holds an apple in her left. The figure is offering a libation, a drink offered to a divinity, in keeping with an iconographic type that began to spread across central Italy in the third century BCE.

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 of differing subject, that were also attached to frames and are currently preserved in the Palazzina’s storerooms.

This small figure is probably a miniature votive bronze that was produced in the third century BCE.

Object details

Commentary

This statuette is part of a group of miniature bronzes of various subject preserved in the Palazzina’sstorerooms that is not found in the inventories or bibliography relative to the Borghese archaeological collection. In 2019, Minozzi identified the statuettes as the series of small bronzes restored by the goldsmith Luigi Valadier at the end of the eighteenth century. His work is described in a receipt dated 1773 that was discovered by González-Palacios (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, CCCI), 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 statuette depicts a female figure slightly but clearly moving to the right. Her weight is supported by her left leg while the right is moved to the side. Her right arm is bent at the elbow and outstretched, her right hand holding a patera without a ‘navel’ (omphalos), while her left arm, slightly bent, rests along the side of her body and her left hand holds an apple. She is wearing a long, sleeveless, high-girdled chiton, the lower part of which falls in parallel folds on the right, and a mantle that passes over her left shoulder and is wrapped around her body from the waist down and then around her left forearm. Her head is turned to the right, following her gesture. Her face is framed by wavy, bipartite locks of hair that come down to cover her ears, and her features are roughly defined and vague. Her eye sockets are emphasised by a deep incision and her lips are full. The small bronze depicts a woman offering a libation, in keeping with an iconographic type that was widespread in central Italy from the third century BCE to the imperial period.

Based on stylistic analysis and the rendering of the hair, the sculpture seems to be datable to the third century BCE.

Giulia Ciccarello