34. Roman Silhouette Figures: A Contribution to Music Archaeology?

The question of original function is of great importance in our attempts to understand any archaeological object. For many ancient bronzes, this question is not easy to answer. Technical features, context of the discovery, or figural parallels can often provide valuable information. First of all, however, one must search for comparable bronzes. Only when one expands one’s view from the individual object to all similar artifacts does it become possible to better understand and assess their shared characteristics.

The following examples provide a useful illustration of this methodological approach. Under consideration here are sheet-metal silhouette figures dating to the Hellenistic and Roman periods. The figures are cut from flat bronze sheets about 1 to 3 millimeters in thickness; internal details are incised. Sheet-metal silhouettes with similar features can also be found in the Archaic,¹ Classical,² and early medieval³ periods, but these sheets and all questionable pieces⁴ are only touched upon here for technical and aesthetic comparisons to the silhouettes of individual figures.

I begin my analysis with the silhouette of a dancing warrior in Berlin’s Antikensammlung (cat. 1; fig. 34.1). The helmeted warrior (H: 10.5 cm) wears a short cloak slung around his waist, and appears to be holding a short knife in the right hand. Spread across his torso is a row of short, mostly parallel incisions, which, to judge from two similar examples, represents either a tightly fitting vest or body hair.⁵

Also in Berlin is a long vine-leaf sheet with richly incised detail (cat. 2). In the middle, one of two tendrils is framed by an Apollonian cult-statue (a Baitylos); on the edges of the leaf there are masks and ritual objects, including baskets and tympana.

For comparison, I cite nine individual silhouette figures and a group from Tajikistan. The nine are a Mercury from Chur in Switzerland (cat. 3; fig. 34.2); a dancing girl from the excavations in Tel Dor (Israel) (cat. 4; fig. 34.3); an Apollo with kithara and griffin in Lyon (cat. 6; fig. 34.4); a seated griffin facing right (H: 3.9 cm) on the art market (cat. 13); a pantheistic goddess with torch and polos in Munich (so far the only silhouette figure with a border) (cat. 7; fig. 34.5); a dwarf in Parma with very crudely incised interior drawing (cat. 8; fig. 34.6); a Victoria originally shown inscribing a shield in Reggio Emilia (cat. 9; fig. 34.7); a silhouette of a dancing satyr in the Santa Barbara Museum of Art (cat. 11); a satyr with wineskin and kantharos in the Museo Gregoriano Profano at the Vatican (cat. 10; fig. 34.8); and an offering jug in Verona (cat. 12).

Of particular interest is a group of silhouette figures from the so-called Oxus Temple in Tajikistan: they show Cupid with grapes, with a kithara, with Psyche, with birds, and so on (cat. 5).

The size of these silhouette figures varies greatly. Their height ranges from barely 6 centimeters (cat. 10; see fig. 34.8) to more than 18 cm (cat. 11). The subjects are equally variable. There are goddesses and gods, for example Victoria (cat. 9; see fig. 34.7), Apollo (cat. 6; see fig. 34.4), and Mercury (cat. 3; see fig. 34.2). Particularly striking are the dancing or cavorting figures: a warrior (cat. 1; see fig. 34.1); a girl (cat. 4; see fig. 34.3); and a satyr (cat. 11).

So far as is known, the backs of the silhouette figures are all flat. We might therefore conclude that most of the sheets were inlaid in or otherwise attached to a wooden base. Many of the sheets are perforated, suggesting that they were nailed in place. Some of the perforations are carefully worked, whereas others are so crude as to suggest that they are the result of later repairs.

The most important features of the silhouette figures can be summarized as follows:

1. Silhouette figures on sheet metal that can be dated to the Late Hellenistic and Roman periods are extremely rare. Despite an extensive search, this catalogue consists of only thirteen examples.

2. The findspots reveal a wide geographic spread, from France (cat. 6) and Switzerland (cat. 3) to Israel (cat. 4) and Tajikistan (cat. 5). A cluster appears to be in northern Italy, as indicated by the silhouette figures in Reggio Emilia (cat. 9), Veleia (cat. 8), and Verona (cat. 12).

3. So far as can be determined, the contexts are exclusively Roman, for example in Chur (cat. 3), Lyon (cat. 6), Veleia (cat. 8), and Verona (cat. 12). There are also two sanctuaries: Tel Dor (cat. 4) and the Oxus Temple (cat. 5).

4. In style and quality, the silhouette figures show considerable differences, pointing to several workshops. Alongside superficial or clumsy incision, as on the dwarf in Parma (cat. 8; see fig. 34.6), there are also original and expressive or routinely conventional interior drawings, as on the Vatican satyr (cat. 10; see fig. 34.8) or the dancing girl in Tel Dor (cat. 4; see fig. 34.3), and a few works of high quality, such as the Munich goddess (cat. 7; see fig. 34.5) and the Victoria in Reggio Emilia (cat. 9; see fig. 34.7).

5. The subjects reveal a clear preference for figures from the Apollinian and Dionysian realms.

Because a number of the sheets must have been affixed to small wooden boxes or other furniture (see cat. 7 and 12), it seems probable that most of the silhouette figures originally served as decoration for wooden musical instruments.

Both literary references and a few figural representations indicate that figural inlays in wooden musical instruments are distinct possibilities. Two examples are a bronze lyre from Kertsch, today in St. Petersburg, with apparently secondarily used reliefs of Victoria and Mars on the inner side,⁶ and a kithara decorated with an image of Marsyas that belongs to a marble statue of Apollo from Bulla Regia, now in Tunis.⁷

Of particular interest is a miniature bronze kithara, which the Akademisches Kunstmuseum of the University of Bonn purchased in 2009.⁸ The kithara, which originally must have been the attribute of a statuette of Apollo, preserves inlays in different metals on both sides, in imitation of intarsia. On the inner side is a theatrical mask and on the outer side there is a seated Eros. Similarly, we can propose that most of the silhouette-figures were used to adorn actual wooden musical instruments.

Notes