A ROMAN BRONZE GROUP DEPICTING ARTEMIS AND A FAWN, CIRCA 2ND CENTURY A.D.

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A ROMAN BRONZE GROUP DEPICTING ARTEMIS AND A FAWN, CIRCA 2ND CENTURY A.D.Cast in the round and preserved from the shoulders down, the goddess stands frontally on a rectangular moulded plinth, her weight carried on the right leg with the left slightly advanced. She wears a short belted chiton, girded high beneath the breast with a thick knotted cord, the drapery falling in deep vertical folds over the hips and terminating above the knee in a scalloped hem. A second garment, gathered at the shoulders and now torn across the chest where the head and arms are lost, cascades down the back in heavy pleats. The legs are bare below the tunic, and the feet are shod in laced hunting sandals with tongued flaps rising over the instep. To her right, mounted on the same plinth, stands a small fawn, alert and forward-facing, with long ears pricked, incised eyes, and slender legs planted squarely. The surface retains a variegated patina of green, red, and cupreous brown, with earthen encrustation in the recesses of the drapery.The short girt chiton, the hunting sandals, and above all the attendant fawn identify the figure as Diana in her aspect as huntress, the Roman counterpart of the Greek Artemis. The deer is her constant companion in both cult and myth, sacred to her since the Homeric Hymns and inseparable from her iconography in Roman domestic bronzes. The lost upper portion would almost certainly have carried a quiver strap across the chest and a raised arm drawing an arrow or holding a bow, following the Hellenistic type disseminated widely through the Roman West after models associated with the Artemis of Versailles and related Diana Venatrix compositions.Bronzes of this scale and quality belonged to the private devotional sphere rather than to public cult. Statuettes of Diana were placed in the lararium, the household shrine in which Roman families honoured their tutelary deities and personal favourites among the wider pantheon. Diana's role as protector of the household, of women in childbirth, and of the boundary between cultivated and wild ground gave her a particular place in domestic worship, and her image in bronze recurs consistently through the provinces of the Empire from the first through the third centuries. The medium itself carried weight: cast bronze of this size represented a significant commission, requiring a lost-wax model, an armature, and finishing by cold work, and its survival in the archaeological record almost always points to a household of some means.The pairing of goddess and animal on a shared plinth is a compositional refinement not universal to the type. Many surviving Diana bronzes preserve only the figure, the deer having been cast separately and since lost, or omitted altogether in favour of the attribute held in the hand. Where the fawn is retained on the base as here, the group reads more explicitly as a narrative tableau, the goddess in the act of hunting or in quiet communion with her sacred animal, rather than as an isolated cult figure.The present group exemplifies the domestic Diana bronze of the middle Imperial period, in which a Hellenistic prototype is reduced to lararium scale without loss of the sculptural weight and drapery articulation of its models. The survival of the fawn in situ on the original plinth is the distinguishing feature of this example, preserving the intended reading of the composition even where the upper body of the goddess is lost.Dimensions: Height: 42cm

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