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  • image M1043

Fragment of a Greek (Attic) votive relief

Early 4th century BC to mid 4th century BC

Pentelic marble

Height: 42cm
Width: 26cm
Depth: 9cm

Museum number: M1043

Vermeule catalogue number: Vermeule 294help-vermeule-catalogue-number

On display: Basement South Passage
All spaces are in No. 13 Lincoln's Inn Fields unless identified as in No. 12, Soane's first house. For tours https://www.soane.org/your-visit

Curatorial note

This fragment comes from the left side of the relief and includes a section of the anta on the left as well as the bottom strip. Within this frame, the body of a female figure standing right, in front of a tree (? behind, left), holding a long torch (the upper end of which is broken off) transversally in her raised left and lowered right hands. She is clad in a long chiton and tightly wrapped himation and wears sandals.

This relief and the costuming treatment, pose, etc. of the figure are nearly exactly as in a votive relief in Athens, Artemis and Adorants.1 The goddess Artemis or more likely Kora2, filling the height of the area within the anta, stands right with a long, flaming torch reaching to the upper right corner under the top anta. From the right three half-size adult (two male and one female) and a smaller child worshippers approach with their right hands raised towards the larger figure of the goddess. For the right side of a companion to the Soane fragment, showing two of these worshippers, see the following (Soane fragment M1149/Vermeule 295).

Artemis had a variety of cults in Attica, from Aulis to the Piraeus, as the similar votive reliefs to the Thracian goddess Artemis Bendis indicate3.

1 J.N. Svoronos, Das Athener National Museum, 4 vols, Athens, 1908 - , I, II, p. 463f., pl. LXXVII, no. 1461; S. Reinach, Répertoire de Reliefs Grecs et Romains, 3 vols, Paris, 1909-12, II, P. 321, no. 2, see also p. 320, no. 3.
2 P. Ardnt and W. Amelung, Photographische Einzelaufnahmen antiker Sculpturen, Munich, 1893-1912, no. 1236.
3 See American Journal of Archaeology 68, 1964, p. 327, pl. 99, fig. 8.

Provenance help-art-provenance

Unrecorded.

Literature

A. Michaelis, Ancient Marbles in Great Britain, trans. C.A.M. Fennell, Cambridge, 1882, p. 476, no. 19.


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