An Ancient Marble Herm in the Palazzo Falson Collection

Anthony Bonanno attributes an intriguing bearded marble head to a special category of Greco-Roman sculpture, tracing back its aniconic origin in Greek prehistory and its iconography in Greek Classical art

Among the numerous objects on display in the jewel of a museum that is the Palazzo Falson Historic House Museum in Mdina, the visitor’s attention is attracted by a small head carved in marble. The marble is white with medium-sized crystals and a somewhat honey-tinged patina. The surviving height of the head is 12cm and its maximum width is 9.3cm; the head is, therefore, roughly half life-size (Fig. 1).

In view of the frequent and intensive involvement of Olof Gollcher, the former owner of this collection, in underwater archaeology, one is tempted to attribute the prevailing wear of practically all the surfaces of the marble to the possibility of it having been exposed to underwater currents. Such a possibility is not to be excluded, in which case, however, one would normally expect to find evidence of borings of minute sea creatures on some surfaces, like those found on a marble torso of an Amazon or Artemis lifted out of the sea mud in Marsa in February 1865.1 On the other hand, the tiny flecks of red and blue colour surviving on the facial surfaces would suggest terrestrial wear and tear, even though these same traces of painting do not seem to correspond to ancient colour schemes, except for the reddish brown ones on the hair and beard.

Prof. Anthony Bonanno, B.A.(Hons) (Melit.), D.Lett. (Palermo), Ph.D. (London), FSA, is Professor of Archaeology at the University of Malta within the Department of Classics and Archaeology. He has lectured in Archaeology and Classics at the University of Malta since 1971 and paid lecturing visits to various universities in Europe, Africa, and the United States. He has also authored numerous publications on Maltese archaeology, with a special interest in prehistoric and Classical art.

Apart from the overall wear of the surfaces, the head has suffered breakages of varying sizes and gravity. It lacks the whole neck, the same break depriving it also of the lower end of the beard. The ears are undistinguishable from the tufts of hair which originally hung in front of them and are now missing, more on the right side than on the left, as suggested by the better-preserved head of the same typology discussed and illustrated further on. Largish chips are also noted on the forehead and the hairline above it, especially in the centre above the nose. Minor chips are visible all over the head, including the eyes, nose (which is completely missing), and lips. There are traces of paint (most probably not ancient) on the centre of the forehead and above it, on the nose bridge and on the left eye. The head is flat and plain at the back where a deep, small hole (c. 8mm in diameter) suggests that it was attached to some other body, probably the leg of a table (a trapezophoron).

The head portrays a male figure with a long, hanging beard consisting of rows of locks in the shape of upsidedown question marks. It faces the spectator in strict, uncompromising frontality. It displays a low triangular forehead framed by a thick hair fringe that thickens further sideways toward the ears where it gets slightly furrowed by a tightfitting fillet which descends obliquely from above the forehead to just above the ears and disappears behind them. The hair probably consisted of two rows of small corkscrew locks projecting out over each brow, where they form a sort of miniature bunches of berries that are still perceptible in front of the left ear but completely broken off in front of the right ear. The rest of the hair is treated very shallowly left: right: over the crown and gets wavier at the back. The thick beard flows vertically and abundantly in large s-shaped tresses in the typical style of this figure. The large moustache frames the small mouth whose fleshy lips are further highlighted by two drilled holes, one on each end, and a dimpled depression separating the lower lip from the chin.

The provenance of the head is unknown. The most knowledgeable persons familiar with the archive of Olof Gollcher, the wealthy owner whose collection accumulated over a great number of years adorns the Palazzo Falson, have been consulted but not a single hint has been identified regarding the object’s acquisition. The provenance of an archaeological object is generally very helpful towards the reconstruction of its biography: where it came to light in the first place and how it found its way to the known owner. Without this record, the object can only be appreciated for its own merits, whether they are aesthetic or simply intriguing, a source of curiosity.

In this particular case, some light on its significance in terms of spatial context is cast by the occurrence of other objects of the same typology in the same microinsular context. In fact, five other similar herms have been recorded and published in the Maltese national collection, four of which are unmistakably small herms, while the fifth one could possibly derive from a different type of monument, but has exactly the same dimensions.2 The presence of at least five such herms in Malta makes it likely that some of them are of local provenance, probably having once decorated Roman houses or villas inhabited by people of some artistic taste, although which particular dwellings they are, at present, is not possible to tell, owing to the absence of specific records of their provenance. Nevertheless, even in this case, this piece of sculpture has its own artistic and archaeological relevance that can be enhanced by eventual archival discoveries.

At this stage, it is appropriate to introduce this somewhat unusual category of ancient sculpture: herms. Indeed, what are they? The remote origin of herms goes back to prehistoric Greece when plain, aniconic stone slabs were inserted in the ground at the edges of rural land properties to mark their limits or boundaries. The term ‘herm’ itself might derive from the ancient Greek word (hermata, pl. of herma) for stones piled up to serve the same purpose, that is, as property boundary markers. Their figurative successors suggest that even at that stage they carried symbolic, or religious connotations. Eventually, in early Classical times, by about 480 BCE, they had assumed their canonical shape, consisting of a tall four-sided pillar whose upper part was sculpted to represent an armless bust (head and neck, at most a small part of the shoulders) of a bearded divinity, namely Hermes. It is then that they assumed the role of protection of houses and even cities. Occasionally, the front face of the plain pillar carried also the sculpted male sexual organ, probably for apotropaic purposes—to ward off evil.

Hermes, whose name is also closely associated with this sculptural typology, was the messenger god par excellence in Greek mythology and religion, but he was also associated with rights of land property. These herms ended up populating in great numbers the streets of Greek cities, like Athens. Several of them were placed at the entrance to the Acropolis of that city, in its marketplace (the Agora), at the crossroads and even near private house doors. On one occasion, in the late fifth century BCE, precisely in 415, they made history because Alcibiades, a famous young noble Athenian politician was accused of having been involved in a sacrilegious mutilation of a large number of such herms, a scandal that raised quite an uproar among different circles of Athenian society.3

At this early Greek phase, these herms were life-size, sometimes even larger, and the deity tended to maintain its archaising features. A good example is the Hermes of Alkamenes, a sculptor who was active soon after the midfifth century BCE and whose name appears inscribed in Greek on two herms, one found in Pergamon and the other in Ephesos, now in Istanbul Museums (Fig. 2). But in Hellenistic times, from the end of the fourth century BCE onwards, it became fashionable to reproduce copies of portraits of famous personalities, such as statesmen (like Demosthenes) (Fig. 3), philosophers (like Socrates), and playwrights (like Euripides and Menander) on top of the squared pillars. On the other hand, many examples survive as freestanding busts, without the lower aniconic extension and, sometimes, depicting two joined portraits facing opposite directions. Towards the end of the period, from the first century BCE, smaller versions of the latter became increasingly popular and widespread. Other

Figs 5-6 divinities and mythical figures were reproduced, such as beardless Dionysus, bearded Herakles, satyrs, fauns, and even maenads. In general, however, when divinities and mythological figures were represented, they did maintain their Dionysian attributes and spirit, especially in their elaborate hairstyle. The Romans extended the range of divinities depicted by these smaller herms even further, occasionally even to portray individuals. A group of them are thought to represent Alexander the Great.4

As a result of this, herms also shed off their original purpose and assumed a purely decorative function. In Roman times this trend continued to gather momentum and we find such small-scale herms—sometimes referred to as ‘miniature herms’—used as garden furniture, especially in houses and villas in the Campanian towns destroyed by the Vesuvian eruption of 79 CE, like Pompeii, that are preserved in the Antiquarium of Pompeii and the National Museum of Archaeology of Naples.5 Another Italian town that produced numerous examples is the harbour town of Cosa.6 But even distant Roman provinces have yielded several specimens, the ones from the Iberian peninsula being the most numerous, carved from different types of marble and coloured hard stone.7 Some of them are thought to have been placed on top of freestanding low columns in gardens or inserted in wall niches, but also attached, as figurative crowning elements, to stone or marble table supports (trapezophora), as revealed by the most comprehensive catalogue of them so far, amounting to no less than 430 specimens, published in 1998.8

As mentioned before, the national collection of Greco-Roman sculpture of Heritage Malta, the catalogue of which is in the process of being published online,9 contains five small decorative herms, like the one featured here, which have never been exhibited, mainly because of their unknown provenance.10 The closest comparable head in this reserve collection shows that the plain back of the Palazzo Falzon herm (Fig. 1) was originally at right angles to the base, and the present apparent tilt backward is due to the uneven break at the bottom. This same herm, even if fragmentary to some extent, is in a much better condition and gives us a very good idea of the original appearance of the Mdina head (Fig. 5-6).

In view of the badly battered state of preservation of the Mdina head and its missing parts, the best way to make up for these deficiencies is to place it side-by-side and compare it with this herm from the Malta’s national collection. Although the latter too has a few minor missing elements, it clearly belongs to a shared typology displaying the same iconography of the same divinity, that is, a bearded Hermes. The stylistic treatment of both the hair and the facial features, however, is far from identical. The most striking difference is the more organic treatment of the bone structure and the fleshy parts of the face that have survived in the Mdina head, which contrast with the plain and smooth surfaces of the Valletta Hermes. They are much more naturalistic, showing pronounced cheekbones and fleshy lips. The eyeballs were faithfully rendered in marble, in sharp contrast with the gouged-out eyeballs of the Valletta head, which were probably intended to be filled in some other material, like ivory and glass. Equally striking is the absence of the deep and continuous grooves that frame the mouth and mark the central vertical partition of the beard in the Valletta version.

As far as dating is concerned, the Palazzo Falson herm can be safely said to belong to the Roman period in general terms. From the technical point of view, the absence of the use of the running drill suggests a time within the first centuries BCE and CE, when the popularity of these small herms was at its highest. In terms of its aesthetic value, it can be said that, beneath its rather poor state of preservation, it hides naturalistic qualities that can be discerned only by the trained eye and by comparison with other specimens from the same typology. Even though at the present stage it does not shed light on its Maltese historical and social context, it may eventually do so if more information on its provenance will ever come to the surface.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Prof. George Camilleri (archive researcher), Francesca Balzan (former Curator of Palazzo Falson) and Caroline Tonna (present Curator of the Palazzo) for their interest and help in my endeavour to trace the provenance of the object.

Notes

1 Antonio Annetto Caruana, Report on the Phoenician and Roman Antiquities in the Group of the Islands of Malta (Malta: Government Printing Office, 1882), 113.

2 Anthony Bonanno, ‘Un gruppo di ermette decorative a Malta’, Archeologia Classica, Vol. 29 No 2 (1977), 399-410, plates 112116.

3 Thucydides, Book 6, Sections 27-29, 53, 60-61, in Richard Crawley, trans., The History of the Peloponnesian War (London: Dent & Sons, 1948), 321, 334, 337-338.

4 Antonio Peña and David Ojeda, ‘Miniature herms representing Alexander the Great’, Hesperia: The Journal of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Vol. 89 No. 1 (2020), 83-124.

5 Antonio Sogliano, ‘Casa degli Amorini Dorati’, Notizie Scavi (1907), 549-593, Figs 1, 3, 5, 20, 27, 30.

6 Jacquelyn Collins-Clinton, Cosa: The Sculpture and Furnishings in Stone and Marble (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2020), 104-123, plates 35-38.

7 Eugène Albertini, ‘Sculptures antiques du Conventus Tarraconensis’, Annuari d’Institut d’Estudis Catalans, Vol. 4 (1911–1912), 323-474, Nos 10, 27-28, 70, 76, 78-79, 219, 220, 224, 226-227. For later publications see citations in Bonanno (1977), 439, n. 2.

8 Claudia Rückert, ‘Miniaturhermen aus Stein: Eine vernachlässigte Gattung kleinformatiger Skulptur der römischen Villeggiatur’, Madrider Mitteilungen, Vol. 39 (1998), 176-237.

9 Cumulative Catalogue of Classical Sculpture at Heritage Malta: https://heritagemalta.org/classicalsculpture/five-columns-grid-2/.

10 Bonanno (1977), 399, n.2.

Professor Victor Grech is a consultant paediatrician with a special interest in paediatric cardiology. He lives in Pembroke with his wife, two children and Siamese cats. He finds painting Maltese landscapes and seascapes a particularly relaxing pastime, and considers the late John Borg Manduca, a well-known Maltese impressionist artist, as his inspiration and mentor.