A ROMAN EROTIC TERRACOTTA OIL LAMP CIRCA 1ST CENTURY A.D.

拍品描述

A ROMAN EROTIC TERRACOTTA OIL LAMP, CIRCA 1ST CENTURY A.D. Of typical Loeschcke form, the body circular with a broad shallow discus, a short rounded nozzle projecting from one side, and small volute-like scrolls flanking the shoulder at the junction of body and nozzle. The discus is framed by two concentric ridges and pierced by a central filling-hole. The nozzle terminates in a wick-hole blackened by use, retaining traces of carbon deposit from burning. The fabric is a fine buff-orange terracotta, mould-made in two halves and luted at the shoulder, with a thin reddish slip covering the surface and calcareous encrustation across the discus. The discus bears a symplegma in low relief. A couple is shown in an intimate posture upon a mattress or draped couch, the female figure reclining and the male kneeling to her right, his weight supported forward. Both figures are nude, their hair rendered in short curls. The bedding beneath them is indicated by parallel striations suggesting a fringed cover or pallet. The composition belongs to the well-established repertoire of erotic scenes that decorated the discus fields of Roman lamps in the Early Imperial period, drawn from a limited stock of pattern-book compositions repeated across Italian and provincial workshops. Erotic imagery of this kind was neither clandestine nor exceptional in Roman domestic material culture. It appears on lamps, on the walls of houses and bathhouses at Pompeii and Herculaneum, and on tableware and mirrors, treated as a subject of everyday visual life rather than one confined to particular spaces. Lamps of this type were mass-produced by mould in workshops around the Bay of Naples and in central Italy from the Augustan period onwards, and were widely exported and copied in provincial centres across the western Mediterranean and North Africa. The terracotta medium itself is significant here: the mould process allowed a single sculpted archetype to be reproduced at scale, so that the same erotic composition might light a bedroom in Rome, a tavern in Ostia, and a house in Roman Gaul, giving these images a circulation quite unlike the unique fresco or the individually carved gem. This lamp exemplifies the standard Early Imperial discus lamp in its most characteristic form and subject, combining the Loeschcke body type with a stock erotic composition of the sort that circulated broadly through the western provinces during the first century. As a surviving example of the domestic material through which such imagery reached ordinary Roman households, it represents the everyday face of a visual culture in which the erotic was neither hidden nor elevated. Dimensions: Length: 9cm

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