Ludovisi Throne

The Ludovisi Throne is an ancient sculpted block of white marble hollowed at the back and carved with bas-reliefs on the three outer faces. Its authenticity is debated; the majority, who accept it, place it as Western Greek, from Magna Graecia, and date it–; from the Severe style it manifests, transitional between Archaic and Early Classical–; to the period about 460 BCE. The Ludovisi Throne has been conserved at the Museo Nazionale Romano of Palazzo Altemps, Rome, since its purchase for the Italian State in 1894.

The central relief is most customarily read as Aphrodite rising from the sea, a motif known as Venus Anadyomene (height 0.9 m, length 1.42 m). The goddess, in clinging diaphanous draperies, is helped by two attendant Horae standing on the shore, who prepared to veil her with a cloth they jointly hold, which hides her from the waist down. The two reliefs on the flanking sides discreetly turn their backs to the mystery of the central subject. The right relief shows a crouching veiled woman who offers incense from a thymiaterion held in her left hand, in an incense burner on a stand. The right slab's dimensions are height 0.87 m, length 0.69 m. The other shows a young nude girl, seated with one knee thrown over the other who plays the double flute called the aulos; her hair is bound in a kerchief. The dimensions of the left slab are height 0.84 m, length 0.68 m.

The iconography of the subject is without a parallel in Antiquity, thus the very subject of the relief is in doubt. Alternative views, since the flanking attendants stand on pebbled ground, have been offered: that the emerging figure is that of the ritual robing of a chthonic goddess, probably Persephone, rising from a cleft in the earth—Pandora is similarly shown in Attic vase-paintings— or of Hera emerging reborn from the waters of Kanathos near Tiryns as Hera Parthenos.

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