Christine Alexander

A Roman Silver Relief: The Indian Triumph of Dionysos

This silver crescent was the ear, or handle, of a shallow dish. Such another dish was once found in the harbor at Bizerta in Tunisia, during dredging operations; it is circular, with two crescent handles, weighs nearly ten pounds, and is about a yard across, over all. If the dish to which our handle belonged was of the same pattern, its span was 21 2 inches. The handle is a thick piece of solid silver, and the ends, now broken off, were probably animal heads whose tapering muzzles, or flowing beards, if they were goats, formed the points of the crescent and merged into the outline of the platter. The two curving slits engaged suitable projections on the rim of the dish and, with solder, held the ear in place. The singular construction of the relief itself will be described below. The subject is the Indian Triumph of Dionysos. The god, driving a chariot drawn by a pair of lionesses from his stable, wears a tunic and flying mantle, with the mask of his panther skin held tight at his waist by a girdle; he has a wreath in his hair and carries a thyrsos. A young satyr with a crooked stick, or pedum, is leading the docile pair by their harness. An old seilenos walks beside with a three-twigged plant; perhaps it is a strange plant from India. Behind is Pan with a syrinx. A bearded satyr dressed in a fawnskin, staggering under the weight of a pair of elephant tusks, brings up the rear. Those tusks are the spoils of India, and there is more booty. In the lower register of the relief are captured helmets, swords with their baldrics, and pairs of greaves, one of each pair shown inside out. There are two trophies, each made of a helmet, shields, and cuirass, erected on a frame. Seated back to back at the foot of each trophy were two captives. These four figures are mostly missing, but the edges of the cavities that held them are preserved, and so is one of the actual figures, from the waist down. He must have had his arms bound high up on his back, like the prisoner on the Gemma Augustea in Vienna. In the middle, between the curved slits, is a pair of cymbals for Bacchic celebration, one of these also inside out.

Reports of the Departments

The most important single group of American paintings to have come to the Museum in many years forms a major part of the collection of the late Adelaide Milton de Groot, which was bequeathed to the Metropolitan this year. These include a number of notable pictures well known to students and collectors of American painting: Thomas Eakinss moody figure study, Arcadia; Winslow Homers forceful post-Civil War composition, The Veteran in a New Field; a particularly brilliant and fresh Shinnecock beach scene by William Merritt Chase, At the Seaside; and Maurice Prendergasts Portrait of a Girl with Flowers, a rare subject in the artists oeuvre. Significant gifts from individuals include examples of earlier American painting: Edgar William and Bernice Chrysler Garbisch gave portraits ofan elegant mid eighteenth century southern couple by Jeremiah Theus; I. Austin Kelly III gave a handsome, simple portrait of Colonel Elie Williams painted by Charles Willson Peale in 1782. Mrs. Gardner Cassatt gave an additional interest in Mary Cassatts superb Lydia Knitting in the Garden at Marly, surely one of the artists most effective compositions. We were fortunate to buy the rare, middle-period landscape by John Twachtman, titled Arque La Bataille, an imposing example of the artists early impressionism, done in Paris during 1885. During October and November an exhibition of American paintings and historical prints from the collection of Mr. and Mrs. J. William Middendorf II was held, presenting over seventy-five paintings and prints of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, all of extraordinary interest. Following this exhibition, a selection of the permanent collection was reinstalled in accordance with the design of the late Associate Curator in Charge of this department, Albert T. Gardner, in which pictures of the nineteenth century are single, double, and even triple hung,

An Attic Relief from Lowther Castle

A marble figure of a woman, broken from a large Attic grave monument, has recently been added to the Museums collections. The woman, seated in an attitude of mourning, represents the dead as she was in life, and it is to her that the monument was erected. The fragment is part of a rectangular slab in very high relief. Before the seated woman there stood, no doubt, another figure, now missing, perhaps that of the husband or father who dedicated the stele or of an attendant holding a box for valuables. The scene was one of departure and farewell. There may have been a crowning pediment, like that of the Lansdowne fragment (Bulletin, 1930, pp. 218 f). This was a large monument, of unusual sculptural quality, and it was a family of wealth and importance that set it up. It is perhaps relevant that the dead is provided with a carved and cushioned throne, or armchair, with a sphinx to support the armrest (the plain edge of the chair back is a restoration) instead of the more usual armless chair or stool. She wears two garments, chiton and himation, the edge of the latter being drawn over her head and held in her hand. She has bands round her hair, and had earrings, since there are holes for their attachment. The surface has suffered comparatively little and has for the most part retained its freshness; the sensitive face and the massive sweep of the drapery are little impaired. The discovery of the relief goes back to the early nineteenth century when British and other travelers were exploring in Greece. One of them, Lord Guilford, found it, in 81 i or soon after, at Acharnai, near Athens. It was sketched by Stackelberg and appeared in his Graber der Hellenen, 1827, plate I, 3. Lord Guilford took it to London, and it reappeared afterward in the collection of the Earl of Lonsdale, of Lowther Castle in Westmoreland. It was listed by Michaelis in his Ancient Marbles in Great Britain, 1882, page 492. Conze published it in 1893 in Die attischen Grabreliefs, i, plate cxiv f, and F. Poulsen in the Einzelaufnahmen, 1929, numbers 3080 f. Diepolder, in Die attischen Grabreliefs, 1921, page 36, relates it to monuments of the late fifth century B.C. The fragment remained at Lowther Castle until recently, seen by occasional visitors, and known through publications to the archaeological world; it can now be seen, in all its quiet power, by a wider public.

Early Statuettes from Greece

But in the Bronze Age the Aegean peoples were not sculptors par excellence, and Island marble for the most part slept in its quarries until the barges called for it in archaic Greek times. Yet in the third millennium B.C., when copper was newly hardened into bronze, strange and prophetic figures made their appearance, carved from translucent white marble and streaked with paint. The center of their distribution seems to have been the

Greek Gems and the Animal World

Greek gems are sealstones, of course; the figures on them are seldom an inch long and are cut in intaglio. Gem-engraving and the cutting of coin dies are twin arts which by their minuscule nature have escaped into the modern world in some measure. But by their very smallness they do not readily yield up their wealth, which must be wrested from them by one device or another. Not all observers have