A Mystery in Marble: Examining a Portrait Statue through Science and Art

purchased by a French private collector who placed the statue in a Parisian garden, where it endured two more decades of outdoor exposure to urban pollutants and acid rain. In December 2007, the piece was shipped to Sotheby’s in New York to be sold at an auction of Greek and Roman antiquities.2 Looking beyond the superficial, curators and conservators from the Yale University Art Gallery discerned the figure’s full potential as a fine example of Roman sculpture and arranged for its final journey to New Haven, Connecticut. There, the story would continue to unfold through scholarly research, scientific analysis, and a lengthy conservation treatment. The six-foot-tall marble statue of a woman is an early Roman portrait, possibly from the eastern Mediterranean, made in the first century b.c. or early first century a.d. The body type, the so-called pudicitia, was commonly used for female portrait statues at that time and was intended to express highly valued characteristics such as modesty, purity, and serenity. The complex drapery patterns on this example are particularly detailed and skillfully carved, with the thicker folds of the tunic visible beneath the thinner mantle that envelops the body (fig. 2). Elements such as the luxurious fringe on the mantle and the closed-toe shoes are individualizing features that mark the image as a portrait, while the Suffering from exposure to the elements, the unidentified woman was wrapped in a blanket and shipped across the English Channel to an undisclosed location in Paris, her exact age and identity unknown. Later, traveling with a French passport, she arrived in the United States and made her way through the streets of Manhattan to an elegant building on the Upper East Side. Standing in a hallway there on a cold December afternoon, the woman’s discolored appearance and awkward pose attracted little attention (fig. 1). The story of the Roman marble statue of a woman that is the subject of this article has the plot twists and intricacies of a popular novel. Although the very beginning remains unwritten, the ending is a happy one for Yale. The current chapter begins when the sculpture was at an English country house and considered to be an eighteenth-century garden statue. It was auctioned as such by Sotheby’s of Sussex in 1987.1 A photograph of the statue from the auction catalogue reveals that the sculpture must already have been displayed outdoors for many years. It was A Mystery in Marble: Examining a Portrait Statue through Science and Art