ARCHEOLOGY – A rich Roman wanted to be represented like a Greek hero, dressed in a lion’s skin and armed with a club. The sculpture will be the subject of a restoration which should in particular deliver its dating.
There is no age to have your portrait taken as Hercules. A lovely ancient sculpture has emerged in recent days from the depths of Italian soil, during a renovation project of a pipe system under Parco Scott, in the south of Rome. The marble statue bears the traditional attributes of the hero of the twelve labors: a club, his weapon of choice, as well as the skin of the Nemean lion, worn as a headdress. However, it was not really a banal classic representation of the demigod, but something else.
Seen a little closer, the character does indeed seem less heroic. The steel body and the torso all in pectorals of the Schwarzeneggerian Musclor of Antiquity hardly show through in the silhouette of human size exhumed at nearly 20 meters deep by the archaeologists of the Archaeological Park of the Via Appia. Worse, the thin, wrinkled features of an old gentleman appear instead of the face of the vigorous son of Jupiter. It was, in truth, not Hercules himself, but the statuary portrait of a wealthy Roman, represented with the attributes of the demigod.
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“An important discovery”
“The statue still needs to be cleaned and then examined, but what is already obvious from the facial features is that it is a figure dressed as Hercules, not the mythological hero himself. », indicated Monday to the Corriere della Sera archaeologist Federica Acierno. “The statue probably represents an important personality of the time”added Simone Quilici, director of the Archaeological Park of via Appia.
After several weeks of excavation work which yielded nothing, the archaeologists were desperate to come face to face with the slightest ancient vestige, until the unexpected discovery of the Herculean portrait, a “particularly important discovery” according to Simone Quilici. The site had been launched several months ago, following several pipe breaks which revealed dangerous cracks in the Parco Scott, specifies a press release from the Archaeological Park of Via Appia published on January 25.
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As suggested by Italian archaeologists, the statue was likely not found where the centuries left it. It would have been carried out of its original context during the work carried out at the beginning of the 20th century.e century in this part of Rome. A time when preventive archeology was not yet fully operational.
Dated, for the time being, from “Imperial Age”, without further details, the sculpture belongs to a type of portraits which consists in making up the subject into a heroic figure – a way of exalting the status of the sponsor. This involved the exhibition of their nudity, more or less realistic according to taste and time. The assimilation to Hercules, in particular, was prized during the reign of Commodus, between 180 and 192. Condensed with sculptural virtuosity, a famous bust of the Roman emperor as Hercules is preserved today in the Capitoline Museums in Rome.