Tub-Shaped Sarcophagus with Three Togated Figures, Fragment

Roman art

Of unknown provenance, this fragment of a tub-shaped sarcophagus has been documented in the park of Villa Pinciana since the eighteenth century, in the ‘Secret Garden of the Flowers at Noon’. In 1827 it was then entrusted to Massimiliano Laboureur for restoration, before being displayed in Room VI, when the new collection layout was presented. The relief fragment includes three male figures, of which only the upper part of the body remains: the two men in the foreground wear togas, clutching a papyrus scroll in their right hand; of the third figure in the background, we see only the face, which, like the others, has been restored. The fragment is a curved section of a tub-shaped sarcophagus imitating a vat for fermenting grapes, bearing clear examples of Dionysian symbolism, circulating in Rome from the second century CE. The three figures were part of a procession, which could have been a family procession, one of philosophers and muses, or one to celebrate the appointment of a consul.

Object details

Commentary

Of unknown provenance, this fragment of a tub-shaped sarcophagus has been documented in the park of Villa Pinciana since the eighteenth century: Montelatici in fact mentions ‘an antique bas-relief of three half-figures in consular dress holding volumes in their hands’ placed in the Secret Garden of Flowers at Noon. This information is later confirmed by nineteenth-century documents that record how the fragment was removed from the garden known as the Garden of the Dragon and entrusted to Massimiliano Laboureur for restoration in 1827, before being displayed in Room VI, on the occasion of the new collection layout.

The relief fragment shows three male figures, preserved only in the upper part of their bodies: the two in the foreground are wrapped in togas, with a papyrus scroll clutched in their right hand; of the third, in the background, only the face emerges, which, like the others, was restored.

The fragment was originally the curved section of a tub-shaped sarcophagus replicating the shape of a vat for fermenting grapes with clear Dionysian symbolic inspiration.

Sarcophagi of this type are attested in Rome since the late Antonine period. The central theme of the composition is generally the married couple to whom the sarcophagus belongs; in one of the most frequent iconographic compositions, the spouses are at the head of two groups of people forming a procession, which could be variously characterised. If in the earliest examples it was usually a Bacchic procession, over time other iconographies appeared, such as family member or generic figure processions, or philosophers and muses processions – the Seven Sages and the Nine Muses –characterising the virtues of the dead, the education of the wife and the wisdom of the husband; another possible option was a procession for a newly appointed consul, as suggested for the Torlonia sarcophagus no. 395. 395, the sarcophagus of Acilia in Rome (MNR, inv. 126372) and a sarcophagus in the Archaeological Museum of Naples (MANN, inv. 6603), all of which are older than the presently considered fragment (Bianchi Bandinelli 1954; Sapelli 1979; Birk 2013).

In this case, even without enough elements to define the theme depicted on the sarcophagus, the treatment of the drapery, with deep furrows and an extensive use of the drill, suggests a dating of the Borghese piece to the age of the Tetrarchy.

Jessica Clementi