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Description
- 661
- Drapery, fragment
- 3rd-4th c. AD
- Densely grained white marble (Italian) with no streaking, polished to a soapy' surface.
- L. 7.9 cm, w. max. 4 cm, th. 1.1-2.4 cm.
- Broken on all four sides, back flaked away. Wear has smoothed the bottom and top edge of the trapezoid shape. Polish partially preserved; buff encrustation with some root marks.
- ThThe nearly trapezoidal fragment is a small flake off the surface of the drapery of a figure in motion (probably female) or else suspended from a figure male or female (i.e. between extended arm and body). The five principal strongly incised lines both define folds and cut across them vertically. The pattern of converging and diverging diagonals denotes cloth that swings as well as clings, relative to the body.
- These folds are only partially plastically modeled; a pleat of thickening convexity runs down the center of the flake but the treatment is otherwise very linear. The fragment is of interest because in material, polish, treatment and probably under-life-size scale, it matches work of the 3rd-c. Hercules and Amazon group and associated drapery fragments, and other small-scale highly finished statuary from the site. Suitable to a 3rd-c. date here are the reliance on strong incision in the place of plasticity, and the regularly geometric patterning both of line and of plastic modeling.