Matthew Sherlock

3/6/2020

Instructor Karen Ros

The Ancient Image of Ulpia Epigone

Archeology is an art as much as a science, the substance of an item is more than its nuts and

bolts. Art, even ancient art, has greater meaning than the surface it depicts. The Mona Lisa

could be thought of as just a painting of a woman, or the Statue of Liberty as a copper effigy of

a woman dressed in a toga. But, it is the details and the surrounding context that give them

depth and meaning. Let us first talk about the surface, before we go into the meaning.

The date of the relief is probably of the late first or early second century based on the

hair style of the woman and the artistic combination of styles of the time make it unique. “A

mythological portrait and an emblematic representation of the traditional virtues are both

suggested within the format of the…relief1”. The material that is used to make this memorial is

Luna marble imported to Rome from another Italian city. Importation of material and the

quality of its construction give us the impression that the woman that was buried in the tomb

was probably a person of substantial means. With the acknowledgement of the purely physical

attributes, let’s go into the more esoteric matters of this piece of historical artwork.

Earlier I mentioned that this relief was (or rather I found a quote that mentioned) a

combination of the mythological and the emblematic. This means that they used artistic

elements usually used for depictions of the gods in an image that is meant to be of a real

1
E D'Ambra, “The Cult of Virtues and the Funerary Relief of Ulpia Epigo” (1989), 1
person. The heroic nudity and the positioning of the figure on the Klinai, calls to mind the

statuary of Venus: attractive, fertile and alluring. However, the visible skin sags and wrinkles

show that the woman that this monument depicts is not a god but a human being. There are

two virtues that the Romans valued in their women, uenustas and castitas, beauty and purity.

The statue is of a voluptuous woman that modestly covers her lower body. Why would a dead

woman care to have her beauty and purity depicted on her gravestone? I think it so that she

seems like the ideal roman. Why does this matter? It is because she may not be an ideal

Roman, she could have been a freed person. A former slave that had found a way to free

herself. In death she is attempting to be accepted as a Roman matron. A citizen that she

wished that she was born as.

All human beings have a desire to be immortalized in some way. We sculpt statues,

write books, and build structures that touch the heavens that bare our names. This relief has

made sure that this woman’s face will always be remembered by someone somewhere.