PROPERTY FROM THE COLLECTION OF JOHN W. KLUGE SOLD TO BENEFIT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

A ROMAN BRONZE NYMPH

CIRCA 1ST CENTURY A.D.

Details

A ROMAN BRONZE NYMPH
CIRCA 1ST CENTURY A.D.
Reclining to her right on a rocky landscape, a fluted jar tipped over under her right hand, water flowing out over the lip and onto the rocks below, wearing a high-belted diaphanous tunic tied below her breasts, clinging to the form of her body, revealing the hollow of her navel beneath, and a mantle draped over her left shoulder, across her back and right hip and gathered across her legs, exposing her feet as they cross at the ankles, her separately-made left arm with the hand before her, holding an attribute, perhaps a sheaf of wheat, her head turned to her right and angled downward, her oval face with thickly-lidded eyes below sharp arching brows, the small mouth with fleshy undulating lips, her wavy hair parted at the center, bound in a band and tied in a chignon at the nape of her neck, two rectangular tenons below, fused to a section of lead at the back
15 in. (38.1 cm.) wide

Provenance

Private Collection, Switzerland.
with Royal-Athena Galleries, New York, 1990.

Literature

C.C. Vermeule and J.M. Eisenberg, Catalogue of the Greek, Etruscan, and Roman Bronzes in the Collection of John Kluge, New York and Boston, 1992, no. 90-01.

Exhibited

Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, From Olympus to the Underworld, Ancient Bronzes from the John W. Kluge Collection, 26 March - 23 June 1996.

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Lot Essay

Bronzes of this scale were part of the decorative schemes of private and public spaces depicting landscapes, genre scenes, and mythological subjects. Many such examples were found in the ruins of the cities around the Bay of Naples from the 1st century A.D. See, for example, the marble sculpture group of Pan and a Satyr from the House of M. Lucretius in Pompeii, p. 65 in Conticello, et al., Rediscovering Pompeii, where the god sits on a rocky landscape, similar to that on this bronze. See also the depiction of an Oracle seated on a rock before Telephos in the marble relief from the House of the Telephos Relief in Herculaneum, no. 133, p. 167 in Ward-Perkins and Claridge, Pompeii, A.D. 79.

For the composition, compare the marble reclining Nymph in Bologna, no. 8b in Halm-Tisserant and Siebert, "Nymphai" in LIMC.

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