The Asiatic marbles of the Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli

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Highlights

  • The marble provenance of 30 sculptures from the Hadrian's Villa has been studied.

  • Strontium trace data is introduced as a key tool for identifying Göktepe marbles.

  • 21 artifacts (70%) are shown to be of Asiatic origin.

  • 15 (50%) originate from the Göktepe quarries near Aphrodisias.

  • The change in marble use that occurred at the beginning of the 2nd c AD is discussed.

Abstract

Multi-method provenance studies, including petrographic, isotopic, electron paramagnetic resonance and trace chemical analyses, have been carried out on 20 white, 9 black and 1 red artifacts purposely selected to investigate the use and distribution of sculptural marbles at the Hadrian's Villa. A large fraction of the marbles tested (21 samples, 70%) are shown to be from Asia Minor, mostly originating from the recently discovered site of Göktepe near Aphrodisias (15 or 71%). All the 9 black samples investigated and 6 out of 11 white Asiatic marbles are from Göktepe, the remaining being Docimium marble from Iscehisar (4 samples) and Aphrodisias marble from the city quarries (1 sample). The single red sculpture tested proved to be Carian red marble from the Iasos quarries, whereas non-Asiatic marbles include 3 Carrara and 6 Pentelicon samples. The selection of marbles tested is preliminary and incomplete, but, despite this, the results are noteworthy, especially since the marble of other sculptures from the Villa has already been identified as Göktepe. Together with other published results, the marble distribution at the Hadrian's Villa seems to suggest that the use of sculptural marbles in the Roman world underwent considerable changes around the turn of the 1st and the 2nd century AD. The evidence supporting this hypothesis is briefly summarized in the conclusions.

Introduction

A recent study of the sculptures preserved at Caesarea Mauretaniae (Algeria) has brought to light the sudden change that occurred in the city at the beginning of the 2nd century AD, when Asia Minor marbles, mostly coming from the Aphrodisias urban quarries and from the recently discovered Göktepe site, almost completely replaced the Greek marbles from Paros and Mt. Penteli used until then for sculptural purposes (Attanasio et al., 2012). Before that study the marbles of Göktepe were already well known: the black variety (nero antico) had been used by the Aphrodisian sculptors Aristeas and Papias to carve the famous young and old Centaurs (Attanasio et al., 2009) that once decorated the Hadrian's Villa built between 117 and 133 AD. The prominence of the Göktepe marbles, either black or white, is manifest at Aphrodisias, 40 km NE of the quarry site, where they account for approximately 25% of the 100 sculptures tested so far (Attanasio et al., 2013). There is also evidence that their use in the Carian city grew steadily with time and became prevailing in late antiquity.

The growing use of Göktepe marble from the beginning of the 2nd century AD onwards, not only locally but also at Rome and in other western regions of the empire, may be a phenomenon specifically connected with the exceptional quality of this stone and with the highly reputed Aphrodisian workmanship used to work it. However, it may be also indicative of a more general phenomenon that, similarly to what happened at Caesarea, led to a shift from west to east of the sources of the sculptural marbles used in the Roman world. In the case of architectural stones, a similar shift, in which marbles from the Proconnesos in the sea of Marmara almost completely replaced Luna (Carrara) marbles by the end of the 2nd century AD, has been well documented (Amadori et al., 1998, Bruno et al., 2002) and is widely accepted. A number of different but interconnected reasons have been proposed to explain these changing trends, including expanding quarrying activity and easier trading routes, but also the fact that decorative and stylistic models typical of the Asiatic workmanship met increasing success in the Roman world.

From a purely archaeometric point of view, the Göktepe marble is especially suitable for studying these phenomena because its unique combination of fine grain size and a low level of manganese impurities generally allows easy and unequivocal identification. Its presence may also act as a “marker” signalling the possible presence of other Asiatic marbles, which are frequently more difficult to identify. In the course of the present study identifications of Göktepe marble were guides to identifications of marble from the Docimium and Aphrodisias city quarries.

In order to verify these hypotheses about the presence of Asiatic marbles in central Italy, systematic testing of well-dated Roman sculptures is necessary, and the work carried out at Hadrian's Villa on 30 selected artifacts which are primarily sculptures but includes some also some decorative and architectural elements represents a first step in this process. As a precisely dated, imperially sponsored project, the Villa is an exemplary summary of the artistic and stylistic trends of the time and has stimulated an enormous amount of work, including a series of marble studies, some of which are very recent (Salvatori et al., 1988, Guidobaldi, 1994, Attanasio et al., 2009, Attanasio et al., 2009a, Attanasio et al., 2010, Pensabene, 2011, Pensabene et al., 2012, Leòn et al., 2009, Lapuente et al., 2012a, Lapuente et al., 2012b). These studies need to be updated, however, because the discovery of the Göktepe quarries has revealed that many sculptures thought to be Carrara are, in fact, of Asiatic origin.

The work carried out at the Hadrian's Villa also made it clear that, although Göktepe marbles can generally be pinpointed with relative ease, this is not always the case. In particular, the marbles from Göktepe district 4 exhibit higher manganese concentrations and therefore, unlike the marbles from district 3, are not easy to distinguish from other fine-grained marbles, especially those from Docimium. Alternative strategies, based on the analysis of other trace metals such as strontium, have been developed and have been found to allow full site discrimination, thereby expanding and completing the preliminary results of this work (Attanasio et al., 2010).

Section snippets

Sampling and analyses

The marbles investigated in this study include most of the sculptures and decorative artifacts present in the Museum of the Hadrian's Villa, which were mostly excavated in the early 1950's in the area of the Canopus (Chiappetta, 2008). In addition, fragmentary artifacts found in the so-called Antinoeion, discovered and excavated since 1998 near the Cento Camerelle (Mari and Sgalambro, 2007, Mari, 2010), were sampled with the aim of increasing the number of black stones tested. Compared to the

Data analysis

The provenances of the unknown marbles were established, as usual, by statistical comparison of the experimental data reported in Table 1 with the values available for a database of samples from the most likely source quarries. Obviously, different databases were used for the white, black, and red marbles. The database of white marbles has been fully published (Attanasio et al., 2006) and updated in several instances, including several new quarries in the Ephesos region (Yavuz et al., 2011),

Göktepe/Docimium discrimination and the provenance of the white marbles

The provenance of the Hadrian's Villa samples was first established using the standard procedure developed in the past few years, which uses linear discriminant function analysis to assign the unknown samples to the most probable quarry of origin within a selected database of quarry sites. The following six isotopic, spectroscopic and petrographic/morphological variables were used:

Isotopic:δ18O, δ13C
EPR:Intensity, linewidth
Petrographic/Morphological:MGS (maximum grain size), Colour

Obviously the

Conclusions

The archaeometric results of this study confirm and extend previous work aimed at establishing the provenance of Göktepe and other fine-grained white marbles. It demonstrates that using the standard provenancing approach, based on the combination of petrographic, EPR, and isotopic properties, the marbles quarried in the southernmost district of Göktepe (district 4) can be easily misclassified as Docimium or sometimes Carrara. Additional variables are needed and the analysis of strontium proved

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to express their gratitude to Marina Sapelli Ragni former Superintendent of the Soprintendenza per i Beni Archeologici del Lazio and to Benedetta Adembri responsible for the Area Archeologica of Villa Adriana for making possible this work and for their friendly and helpful support.

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