Talk:Lovatelli urn

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Dating issues

Resolved

– Going with digital LIMC authority.

object was excavated in 1875, but some sources erroneously report 1876 instead. I’m assuming this is a typo
- Not a typo. Appears to correspond with publication by Edoardo Brizio (1876) regarding 1875 finds. Still trying to translate the text from Italian.
there appear to be different usage conventions for the term “Roman imperial period” in different disciplines. This causes some confusion and needs to be resolved
- Confusion fixed.
  - Dated to between 50-75 CE (Ridgway 1990). Viriditas (talk) 10:10, 31 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    - Although this is a subject of continuing confusion in the literature since some scholars believe the design predates the Roman period by several centuries. Not sure what the explanation is, but they claim it is “Alexandrian”. Viriditas (talk) 10:13, 31 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    - Still makes no sense since the urn is commonly dated to the “Augustan period” in the literature, which would make it almost a century older than it has been dated. Could be a simple contradiction between older and newer sources. Viriditas (talk) 10:33, 31 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
      - Kinney 1994 dates it to 1st century BCE, not CE. Viriditas (talk) 22:39, 1 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
        Looks like my original edit was correct. It’s dated to BCE per the Digital LIMC. Case closed for now. Viriditas (talk) 22:55, 1 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I’m working on it. Viriditas (talk) 01:04, 30 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

done. Viriditas (talk) 23:14, 1 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
- Hate to reopen this, but I’m fairly certain, based on what I’ve read so far, that Caldelli & Ricci 1999 (and likely others) revised the dates to early 1st century CE. I don’t have access to that publication so I will need to keep looking or ask for help. Viriditas (talk) 02:29, 2 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Dating: some clarifications

Hi Viriditas. I'm writing this in response to the question you left on my talk page. I prefer not to get involved in editing the article on the Lovatelli urn, but I'm happy to try to clear up some of the confusion about the date.

First, the date of the urn itself. When archaeologists and art historians use the term "early Imperial", they usually mean the 1st century CE, corresponding roughly to the Julio-Claudian and Flavian periods. Strictly speaking, early Imperial ought to include the Augustan period as well, since Augustus was the first emperor, but most scholars treat the Augustan period separately, partly because it lasted so long (more than four decades), and partly because a lot of Augustan art has distinctive characteristics that separate it from earlier Republican art and later Imperial art. So in practice, the terms "Augustan" and "early Imperial" mean different things, with the latter applied to the Julio-Claudian period after Augustus (and sometimes extended to the Flavian period as well). The Lovatelli urn has been described as both "Augustan" and "early Imperial", and either one is possible, because pretty much the only basis for dating is the style of the sculpture, and for most periods (including the late Hellenistic and early Roman periods) stylistic dating is notoriously subjective. The truth is that it could easily fall anywhere with the century or so between 25 BCE and 75 CE, or even somewhat outside that range, and no one can prove it one way or the other.

Part of the problem is that most of the scholars who have studied the urn do not really care about its precise date; they are chiefly interested in its iconography and how it can be used to cast light on aspects of the Eleusinan mysteries. Scholars like Burkert and Kerenyi and others who specialize in Greek religion have no special expertise in Roman sculpture that would allow them to form an independent opinion about the date of the urn; they simply accept the dates offered by the relatively few art historians who have addressed that question. This is why most sources refer to it simply as "Roman", or don't offer a date at all. Recent sources that do give a date tend to follow the opinion expressed by Franca Taglietti in the detailed catalogue of the sculpture of the Museo Nazionale in Rome, published in 1979 (A. Giuliano, ed. Museo Nazionale Romano: Le sculture I.1, Rome 1979, pp. 244–248, no. 154), where she (very hesitantly) suggests that the stylistic features of the composition and the carving "forse dare qualche indicazione in favore della prima età imperiale" ("perhaps give some indication in favor of the early Imperial period"). You can see how tentative her conclusion is (and rightly so), but in the absence of any other strong opinions, it has become more or less the consensus. A newer, abbreviated catalogue of the collection of the Palazzo Massimo, published in 2013 (C. Gasparri and R. Paris, eds. Palazzo Massimo alle Terme: Le collezioni, Rome, 2013, pp. 124–125), expresses the same view: "Gli aspetti formali e compositivi consentono una datazione nella prima età imperiale" ("The formal and compositional characteristids permit a dating in the early Imperial period"). This is probably the best you can hope for, although it might be worth consulting the comments of Friederike Sinn, Stadtrömische Marmorurnen (Mainz 1987), pp. 88–90, which I have not seen. If I were writing the article, I would just say "probably early Imperial" or "probably 1st century CE" and not try to be more precise.

A separate issue from the date of the urn itself is the date of the (hypothetical) work that provided the iconographical model for the initiation scene. Taglietti in the 1979 catalogue (p. 247) suggested that it looked back to a work of the late Hellenistic period, for which she suggested a date in the third quarter of the 1st century BCE, and she also noted that it showed traits associated with the "Alexandrian" school of Hellenistic sculpture. These comments are again echoed in the more recent catalogue of the Palazzo Massimo collection. Scholars use terms like "Attic" style and "Alexandrian" style in order to try to impose some order on the confusing variety of styles displayed by sculpture in the Hellenistic period; it does not necessarily mean that the object itself was created in Alexandria or in Athens, only that has it features that modern scholars have (rightly or wrongly) associated with those centers of artistic production. This is the source of some of your confusion above, especially in regard to Brunilde Ridgway's comments. When she writes (in Hellenistic Sculpture III: The Styles of ca. 100-31 B.C., Madison, 2002, p. 181, note 28) that the Lovatelli urn is "said to be possibly Alexandrian although found in Rome, and dated to the 3rd quarter of the 1st c.", this passage of Taglietti's description is what she is referring to. She means the 3rd quarter of the 1st century BCE (not CE, as you assumed above). It sounds as if Ridgway is dating the existing urn itself, not its model, to the late Hellenistic period. I don't know if that is simply because she misread or misremembered what Tagietti said, or if she actually thinks that the urn is not a Roman work; if she does, it would be a departure from the scholarly consensus, but stylistic dates are so imprecise that a late Hellenistic date for the urn is certainly not impossible. Still, this is an outlier, and for Wikipedia purposes it shouldn't affect your view of the general consensus, which favors a Roman date.

Finally, there is the question of the date of the discovery of the urn. Here on the talk page and in the article, you come down on the side of 1875, but I think that is probably mistaken. It's true that Brizio's 1876 report describes excavations in 1875, but the urn does not seem to have been found in those excavations. Instead, it was found in the follow-up excavations that took place under the supervision of Rodolfo Lanciani, as reported in the Notizie degli scavi for 1877. There, on p. 314, Lanciani says that the success of Brizio's excavations prompted the Italian state to acquire the property and conduct further excavations of its own, excavations which he describes as "eseguiti nei mesi di giugno e luglio, ottobre e novembre del decorso anno" ("conducted in the months of June and July, October and November of the past year") -- i.e., 1876. That the urn published by Lovatelli was found in these excavations, not earlier, is indicated by Lanciani's inclusion of it in a list of objects produced by his excavations, where it is briefly described (p. 321) as "altro cinerario in marmo diafano, elegantissimo, in forma di secchia, con coperchio a squame, e rilievi figurati nel giro esterno alto m. 0, 31" ("another cinerary urn of translucent marble, very elegant, in the form of a bucket, its lid covered with scales, and figures in relief, 31 cm high, around the exterior"). The 1979 sculpture catalogue of the Museo Nazionale gives the date of discovery more precisely as July 1876 (but doesn't state the evidence for the month; presumably the museum has records of some sort in addition to Lanciani's published report), and the same date is repeated in the 2013 catalogue of the Palazzo Massimo. So I think the evidence is pretty clear that the urn was found in 1876 rather than 1875.

Hope this helps to clear up some of the confusion. Cheers, Choliamb (talk) 14:56, 14 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Choliamb: Thanks for the time you put into that. I've got about a dozen other articles on similar subjects that need your expertise, but I'll give you a breather and maybe contact you in the near future for help. Thanks, again. Viriditas (talk) 00:11, 15 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Images

Working

I’m working on uploading the full, rolled out image of the entire urn, but I’m having trouble locating the original figure. It appears in one of the five volumes of The Cults of the Greek States, which are in the public domain. I will upload it when I find it. Viriditas (talk) 01:10, 30 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Burkert (1987) provides all the images and the explanatory material. TBD. Viriditas (talk) 00:06, 1 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]