Statue of the Muse Melpomene

Roman art

This statue of a woman, heavily damaged by long exposure to the elements, is almost entirely ancient, with the exception of the head and part of the right arm. The figure is wearing a densely pleated sleeved chiton and a mantle that extends down from the left shoulder, draping over the left side of the body. In her left hand, she is holding a theatre mask, the face of which is missing, close to her chest. The tall, curly hairstyle suggests that it was a tragic mask. This attribute, together with the club that the figure is holding in her lowered right hand, confirm the identification of the sculpture as Melpomene, the Muse of Tragedy. According to Moreno, this statue and the other Muse displayed on the opposite end of the balustrade might have come from the complex of the Muses unearthed in the Roman villa of the Bruttii Praesentes, at Monte Calvo, in Sabina. The Muses were purchased in 1834 and six of them were sold in 1895 to the Ny Carlsberg Glyptothek, Copenhagen.

Object details

Commentary

In 1837, during the structural renovation of the Villa Pinciana, the architect Luigi Canina arranged for the installation of various sculptures on the main facade, installing this statue of a woman on the last of the four rectangular bases carved in high relief with heraldic symbols of the Borghese family and arranged on the balustrade of the terrace, flanked on the left by a statue of a togate man (Petrucci 2014, p. 188). According to Moreno (catalogue entry), this statue and the other Muse displayed on the opposite end of the balustrade might have been part of the group of Muses unearthed in the Roman villa of the Bruttii Praesentes, at Monte Calvo, in Sabina, which was excavated starting in 1823 and was also where the Dancing Satyr (CCXXV) was found. Purchased in 1834 and therefore not included in the Inventario Fidecommissario, the two terrace statues are the only ones that remain at the villa, while six others (four of which were in Room III until 1888) were sold in 1895 to Carl Jacobsen for the Ny Carlsberg Glyptothek, Copenhagen (Brusini 2001) along with the Juno, the Anacreon, the Tyrtaeus and the Seated Poet.

This statue of a woman, heavily damaged by long exposure to the elements, is almost entirely ancient, with the exception of the head and part of the right arm. The woman’s left leg supports her weight, while her right leg is slightly bent and moved forward. The figure is wearing a sleeved chiton with dense pleats, pulled tight beneath the chest by a belt, and a himation that hangs down from the left shoulder, draping over the left side of her body. In her left hand, she is holding a theatre mask, the face of which is missing, close to her chest. The tall, curly hairstyle suggests that it was a tragic mask. This attribute, together with the club that the figure is holding in her lowered right hand confirm the identification of the sculpture as Melpomene, the Muse of Tragedy.

This iconography was used in the Roman world to depict both Melpomene and musician Muses as early as the first century BCE. It can be traced to that of Apollo the cithara player, as seen in a relief by Archelaus of Priene, which is believed to be based on a late-Hellenistic sculpture in the round and was used for numerous sarcophagi made starting in the second century CE (Paduano Faedo 1981, p. 141, note 219). The elements of the drapery and the precise carving of the folds, which can still be appreciated despite the damage to the surface, allow us to date the Borghese sculpture to the Hadrianic period.

Many ancient sources mention sculpture groups of Muses, especially between the fourth and second centuries BCE. However, although the subject was popular, as attested by the many Hellenistic and Roman copies, and has been found in both public and private contexts, what we are still missing is a number of statues with the same provenance that would allow us to imagine a complete group that could have been the archetype cited in the sources. The groups that include a larger number of statues, some sitting, some standing, include the one from the Villa di Cassio, Tivoli, the one from Monte Calvo and, in spite of a degree of uncertainty due to its dispersion, the one from Hadrian’s Villa, in which the imagery used in imperial urban workshop production was formulated in the context of statuary from the late Classical and Hellenistic periods (Ottati 2014, pp. 115–117).

Jessica Clementi