Statue of Artemis the Huntress

Roman art

Documented in an eighteenth-century engraving in the garden of the Borghese family’s city residence, the sculpture was mentioned inside the Villa in 1832.

This statue of a woman portrays Artemis the Huntress and is an exemplar of the Copenhagen-Ostia type. The transparent garment, a mass of dense, soft folds, is knotted under the breasts and on the hips. A deerskin called a nebris, which was worn by participants of Dionysian processions, is arranged diagonally across her chest, coming down the left side of her body. The tall leather boots, called mullei, are typical of Dionysus and evoke the same setting.

The sculpture, which is datable to the second century CE, is a copy of late Hellenistic models.

Object details

Commentary

In about 1691, based on an engraving by Venturini, the sculpture was in the garden of the Borghese family’s city residence, set in a niche in the wall decorated by Carlo Rainaldi to the side of a fountain near the theatre (Falda, pl. 11). In 1832, Nibby mentioned it in the first intercolumn in Room IV of the Villa Borghese, in a niche. He described it as a ‘Diana succinta tenente l’arco […] scolpita in marmo lunense da buon scalpello’ (‘small Diana holding a bow … carved in Luni marble by a good sculptor’; p. 91).

The figure is wearing a short chiton with sleeves, knotted below the breasts and on the hips, where the drapery blouses out in elegant folds. There is a nebris knotted on her right shoulder and pulled diagonally across her chest, coming down the left side of her body. She is wearing tall boots called mullei that were typically worn by members of the circle of Dionysus. The boots, which reveal the toes, are decorated with a leaf at the bottom and an animal skin hanging from the upper edge. The term mullus refers to a type of mullet, which was red like the boots. The figure’s head is slightly turned to the right and crowned by a moon-shaped diadem. Her hair falls in long wavy locks, parted in the middle above the forehead and gathered in the back. The face is oval shaped with soft, full features. The almond-shaped eyes are topped by linear, barely noted brows. The mouth is closed, with small full lips.

In the eighteenth-century representations, the statue has the same appearance as it does today, the missing parts having already been filled in, with the exception of the plinth, which is instead rectangular. The statue portrays Artemis while hunting and is an exemplar of the Copenhagen-Ostia type, which takes its name from two replicas in the late-Hellenistic style (Poulsen 1951 pp. 86–87, no. 89; De Chirico, 1941, pp. 241–245, figs. 17–18).

Lippold noted that the face of Borghese sculpture is heavily restored, although original. Judging the quiver to be a modern addition, the scholar identified the animal skin worn by the woman as pig (1925, p. 11, no. 2742). Bieber noted that the detail of the loose knot of the garment, ill-suited to the activity of hunting, is shared by the various replicas of the type, including the sculpture in Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum. The scholar also observed that the pig skin can be associated with the cult of Diana on the Palatine Hill, where wild boar were sacrificed (Bieber 1977, p. 72, fig. 255). Steuben instead correctly identified the skin as that of a deer, making the mantle a nebris (Helbig, Speier 1966, p. 729, no. 1973).

The handling of the garment, which reveals the women’s body and falls in dense, graceful folds, suggests a date for the Borghese copy in the second century CE.  

Giulia Ciccarello