The RISD Museum mission states that art, artists, and the institutions behind them are vital components of broad civic engagement. Its interpretation of works focuses on the maker, and, more broadly, the museum seeks to build an accessible, inclusive space for all communities. Its collection boasts 100,000 works from ancient times to modern day, in the form of painting, sculpture, decorative arts, textiles, and furniture from around the globe. This mission statement will become an important way to illuminate the Greco-Roman department.
The Weiss Ancient Art Gallery features Roman marble portraits, wall paintings from around Pompeii, floor mosaics from Syria, and Etruscan ceramics. The ancient Greek art gallery is organized thematically: deities, religion, funerary customs, everyday life, and the symposium. A third gallery focuses on the materials and technology that created the ancient art and delves into the impact of time on their preservation.
Due to their age, many of the Greco-Roman artifacts and artworks are broken or fragmented. Some have been incorrectly preserved, such as the ancient Grecian sculptures, which now stand in museums as imperial-looking white statues. In the case of broken sculptures, eighteenth-century artists often resorted to the then-common practice of filling in missing portions or recombining unrelated fragments in the name of restoration. Even when items are in good, complete condition, information is often limited, leaving the museum label sparse: untitled undated, and without the artist.
“Household god (Lar)” is no exception. We know it is Roman, likely from the late 200s to early 300s CE, it is made from Bronze, but even the donor is anonymous. Lar or lares (plural) refers to small bronze protective household deities, and they were grouped in lararia (shrines) throughout the Roman home.
Visually, the statue stands at nearly seven inches tall, in a very dark bronze material. Initially it appears perfectly preserved, but open closer inspection, the fingertips, thumb, and object in the left hand and the object in the right hand are actually missing. The object in the right hand was likely a cornucopia or rhyton (drinking horn), but there is not enough evidence to suggest what the object in the left hand may have been. The figure stands in a contrapposto pose, and he wears a robe that ties at the midsection, open-toed sandals, and what appears to be a laurel wreath.
Invisible to the museum-goer, underneath the skirt is a rectangular hole the leads into a cavity of the sculpture, meaning the artist probably used the hollow lost-wax casting technique to create it. Hints of gilding remain in the pleats of the robe, on the wreath, and under the skirt. Below the sash, there are two vertical channels, which means the costume once featured inlaid copper strips. Even though this was a holy object, there is a casting flaw above the right knee, on the skirt. Finally, the textured pits on the surface are not from antiquity, but they were caused by chemical solvents left by early conservators.
In terms of the statue’s material, ancient Romans favored bronze, an alloy of 90% copper and 10% tin, for its material and aesthetic qualities. The addition of tin allowed the metal to remain in a molten liquid state for longer, which allowed for mold-filling and therefore higher quality castings. It also boasts a greater tensile strength, meaning it can be stretched longer before it breaks, giving artists more flexibility in their subject. While marble sculptures required noticeable support structures, even larger bronzes could stand freely because they could be hollow.
Literary records tell us that the surface finish was incredibly significant during antiquity. The ancient Romans valued polished bronze because of its lustrous golden-brown finish, similar to that of tanned skin. Because of nearly two thousand years of corrosion—exposure to moist, oxygen-rich environments—the color of the lar is dull and discolored, with specks of orange, yellow, and green on its surface.
Metals overall were important in antiquity due to their breadth in use. They were used not only for the utilitarian but also for the decorative: weaponry, armor, belts, vessels, pots and pans, jewelry, bronze figurines, and statues, etc. Only a slim portion of metal objects have survived though, and historians speculate that among other reasons, Romans must have melted some down for reuse during challenging times. The majority of items that have survived to modern day are bronze, but ancient Romans used other metals as well, such as gold, silver, pewter, brass, and lead.
So far, the discussion of the lar has come exclusively from information made available by the RISD Museum. Digging further into the item’s purpose using resources outside the museum, we can learn more about Roman culture. What was happening historically in the late 200s to early 300s CE? The Roman Empire spanned from 27 BCE to 1493 CE, reaching the height of its power in 117 CE until Emperor Trajan died. In fact, Rome was the largest city in the world from circa 100 BCE to 400 CE.
To set the stage for the time period in which the lar was produced, we begin in 235 CE with the assassination of Emperor Severus Alexander. His assassination sparked the Crisis of the Third Century, in which the Roman Senate declared 26 men emperor in a mere 50-year period. It wasn’t until the reign of Diocletian from 284 to 305 CE that stability finally returned, and he created a new tetrarchy system with four emperors each ruling a quarter of the empire. Ultimately, tetrarchy collapsed and Constantine the Great’s rule began. He was the first Roman Emperor to convert to Christianity and by the late fourth century CE, Christianity became the official religion.
With a historical context, we can better understand the lar’s purpose. While the museum label tells us that it is a household god, that does not provide much information. Lar has a debatable etymology. It could be derived from the Etruscan word lar or larth, which means lord. Alternatively, Lar is the Latin name for the spirits of the dead, who even in the afterlife continue to bring blessings to their descendants. However, the domain of the lar could extend beyond the household. Some lares protected roads, agriculture, livestock, or even towns.
The Roman worship of lares derives from the funerary practice of burying the dead in one’s own house, until it was outlawed in the Twelve Tables around 450 BCE. The lar was housed in a cupboard in the house, and the family would salute it daily with a morning prayer and an offering from their table. They would conduct more elaborate rituals on special occasions such as birthdays, weddings, anniversaries, or departing or returning from a journey. For example, during a boy’s coming-of-age ceremony, he would give the household lar his bulla, his personal amulet, before donning the toga virilis, the toga of manhood. When his first beard is cut off, the clippings would also be placed in the lararium.
For a Roman girl’s coming of age, she would surrender her dolls to the family lar before her wedding night. On the day of marriage, she would begin to worship her husband’s lar by paying him a copper coin on the way to her new home. The lar was certainly a key component in their religious identity because a homecoming Roman could be characterized as returning ad Larem (to the lar). Even when non-Christian cults were banned in the late fourth century CE, cults to Lares continued to exist into the early fifth century CE.
Again, because lares weren’t limited to the household, even the city of Rome was protected by a Lar in a shrine on its sacred boundary, and each Roman vicus (administrative ward) would also have a Lar in a shrine at key crossroads. These Lares were Lare Compitales (derived from the Latin compitum), gods of the crossroads, so Romans would make sacrificial offerings at crossroads rather than at home. The offering itself would be the same, a honey-cake from each household. Each year, they were celebrated during the new year at the Compitalia festival, which was invented by Roman king Servius Tullius, who had a soft spot for the plebeians and slaves because he himself was, according to legend, fathered by a Lar but borne of a slave woman.
In fact, Dionysus of Halicarnassus, a Greek historian, wrote that the Lares looked kindly on the service of slaves. Thus, although the festival was designated for people of all classes, it did have a plebeian aura. It is significant that every household, regardless of status, had a household Lar. (The difference would be the quality and grandeur of the lararium). Therefore, what’s powerful about these city-wide Lares were that their celebration was representative of the plebeians, not of the patricians. Even though the festival was invented by royalty, it is still rooted in the people.
Lares are represented as youthful men dressed in tunics made from dogskin, according to Plutarch. They pose as though they are dancer’s, delicately balanced on one leg. It is very standard for lares to have one hand extended out and another raised up, with a patera (libation bowl) in the extended hand cornucopia or rhyton in the raised hand. Lares are often paired, so painted shrine-images of lares mirror each other in pose, flanking a central figure that historians believe to be an ancestral genius, a Roman guardian angel.
Although it was a part of daily Roman life, the scope of the lares’ potency has limits. They were not as powerful as the twelve major gods of the Roman Pantheon (the gods with Greek counterparts, e.g. Jupiter and Zeus, Mars and Ares). Now that we understand the types of religious customs, we need to place religion in daily life. How significant a part was it? The Romans considered themselves incredibly religious, and they credited their empire’s success to their piety and therefore the gods’ satisfaction. Even their calendar was developed around religious holidays.
Religious activities did not preclude traditionally subjugated demographics either—women, slaves, and children all partook. Moreover, some rituals could only be performed by women, and it was not men but women who composed the most famous Roman religious order, the Vestals, priestesses of the hearth, up until its disbandment when Christianity became the official religion.
After a discussion on historical context, the purpose and variety of Lares, and religion’s significance in Roman life, we can return to an assessment of the RISD Museum’s context for the object. The Lar is placed in a glass case with twelve other bronze objects of various uses. Perhaps it would be more appropriate to contextualize this object with a recreation of a lararium and its associated offerings. This re-imagining of the Lar would emphasize religious customs in Roman life rather than the current state, which emphasizes bronze as a material in Roman antiquity. Both have their merits. In any case, even though the label does not contain much detail, the RISD Museum online catalog does go into greater depth to contextualize the object for a curious visitor, including myself!