El Relieve de las Ménades de "Thuburbo Maius" (Túnez)

Abstract

The ‘Relief of the Maenads’ of Thuburbo Maius is a Neo-Attic style piece dated to the second half of the 1st century BC. It is a Pentelic marble work, its height is 37 cm, and currently it is preserved in the Bardo National Museum, in Tunis. Maenads are the feminine element of the Dionysiac thiasos. They were the women dominated by the Bacchic madness that came with Dionysus/Bacchus in the celebration of his cult. In the relief two maenads, or Bacchae, appear dancing: both are back to back each other; the girl on the left side, from the point of view of the spectator, carries in her right hand a knife and in the other hand, the back half of the inert body of an animal. The maenad on the right holds a thyrsus in her right hand and carries in the left hand the front half of the same inert body as her colleague. It is important to emphasize the delicacy of the peploi of the girls, and because they are sweating from the dance, it is possible to see part of the female figure. Both girls appear barefoot and do not rest their feet completely on the ground. The work is based on the original relief, probably in bronze, of the artist Callimachus, disciple of Phidias; the artist, being faithful to his absolutely precise style, the representation of the protagonists stands out for its exquisite delicacy and dedication. However, the first representations of maenads that are conserved in the LIMC collection date from the 6th century BC. Since then, their iconography was consolidated across all artistic media and they were portrayed with their own features and personalities. They may appear either alone or in the company of one or more of their colleagues, or else as members of the Dionysiac thiasos along with other figures, as the god Dionysus himself. If we pay attention to the particular iconography of women as mythological characters, the maenads usually appear in movement, or dancing, prisoners of the ecstasy in the Bacchic rituals. The tragedy of Euripides popularized them greatly and their representations, first in small-size ceramics, then in marble on a large scale, became popular and famous, forming concrete iconographic typologies that the artists imitated by order. For this reason, there are numerous copies of dancing maenads whose function is completely decorative. The copies collected in this paper that will be subjects to analysis are: the copy from the Galleria degli Uffizi, the copy from the Giovanni Barracco Museum, from the Villa Albani and the Capitoline Museums, from the Museum of Turin, from the Louvre Museum, the four reliefs from the Prado Museum, the copies from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, from the British Museum and the broken relief from the Corinth Museum. In addition, the dancing maenads appear decorating other media, such as circular bases, fountains, altars, kraters, oscilla and even a sarcophagus with a Dionysiac scene. With this variety of data, this paper will determine which iconographic typology succeed more and will reflect on the possible role of these girls in the Dionysian world and, in general, their role in the Greco-Roman world.