Statuette of a Lar

Roman art

This small statuette is preserved, together with a series of small bronzes of various subject, in the storerooms of the Palazzina Borghese. It depicts a dancing Lar, wearing a short, generous tunic cinched at the waisted and puffed out near the left hip by the movement of the dance step. He is wearing a type of tall sandal called endromides. The hands are only partially preserved and would have held a patera, a small tray used for libations, and a drinking horn. The subject is associated with the Lares Compitales, divinities who watched over the compita, or crossroads, and later became linked to protecting the home.

This small votive bronze is datable to the first century CE.

Object details

Commentary

This statuette depicts a dancing Lar, his left leg moved forward, and his right leg moved back. He is wearing a generous, short tunic fastened at his left shoulder and cinched at the waist with a cinctusthat creates a large overfold called an apoptygma. The drapery near the left hip is puffed out like a sail by the dance movement. He is also wearing a type of tall sandal called endromides. His head is slightly turned to the right and heavily abraded. His face is youthful and his hair, arranged in short, thick curls, is topped by a crown of leaves. His left arm is raised while his right arm is extended out in front of the body. He would have held a patera, a small tray used for sacrificial libations, in his right hand. The figure is standing on a circular base.

The small bronze is an exemplar of a popular type of dancing Lar characterised by the clothing and the pose of the limbs. The iconographic model of the young man dancing is associated with the Lares Compitales, a divinity that was originally a protector of agricultural properties, especially venerated at crossroads (Floriani Squarciapino 1961, pp. 479–485) and later linked to the domestic sphere as tutelary gods of the home and family called Lares Familiares (Giacobello 2008, pp. 33–98). With the reform introduced by Emperor Augustus between 14 and 7 BCE, the LaresCompitales took the name Lares Augusti, reflecting the emperor’s cult, flanking the image of the Genius Augusti (Kunckel 1974, pp. 22–26). Iconographically, the Lares Compitales and the LaresFamiliares differ primarily in the degree of dynamism expressed, dancing in the case of the former, static in that of the latter (Pollini 2008, pp. 393–397).

Among the numerous small bronzes of the same subject that were discovered in Pompeii, the Borghese statuette shares particularly strong similarities with one that is of higher quality and alsocomplete, including the divinity’s attributes (the patera and the drinking horn), and dates to the Flavian period (inv. 12840: Anderson 1990, pp. 140–142). The refined play of the clothing and the pose of the legs instead suggests a link to an exemplar unearthed at the site known as Silvano’sbakery in Ostia Antica (Calza, Floriani Squarciapino 1962, p. 102). The statuette is part of a group of miniature bronzes of various subject preserved in the Palazzina’s storerooms that is not found in the inventories or bibliography relative to the Borghese archaeological collection.

The impressionistic character of the sculpting, although rudimentary in execution, suggests a date during the Flavian period.

Giulia Ciccarello