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The Mausoleum Frieze: Membra Disjectanda
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 September 2013
Extract
Coming as they do from one of the Seven Wonders of the World, the frieze-blocks of the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus are among the most celebrated sculptures in the British Museum. In the century since their acquisition, many mutually contradictory attempts have been made to attribute the various slabs to the four sculptors of the Mausoleum as named by Pliny: Skopas, Bryaxis, Timotheos, and Leochares. Most of these attributions have been made by scholars working away from London, apparently chiefly from photographs. A new study of the slabs themselves suggests that the establishment of the integrity of the sculpture is an essential preliminary to the ‘higher criticism’ that has been practised so assiduously. It is therefore the purpose of this note to examine the various fragments that have been attached to the slabs from time to time, and to try to determine whether these joins can be accepted. As Curtius said, ‘Primum monumenta, deinde philosophia’.
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- Copyright © The Council, British School at Athens 1976
References
Acknowledgements. This note is a by-product of a detailed study of the frieze-blocks undertaken in connection with the forthcoming Relief Sculpture of the Mausoleum by Bernard Ashmole, the late Donald Strong, and myself. I am grateful to Professor Ashmole for agreeing to a separate publication of this preliminary work, and to D. E. L. Haynes, Keeper of the Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities at the British Museum, for sanctioning it. The photographs are all published by permission of the Trustees of the British Museum. Abbreviations, in addition to those current in BSA:
Papers Papers respecting the Excavations at Budrum. Presented to both Houses of Parliament by Command of Her Majesty (1858).
Further Paper Further Paper respecting the Excavations at Budrum. Presented to both Houses of Parliament by Command of Her Majesty, in continuation of the Papers presented to Parliament, March 26, 1858.
Hist. Disc. Newton, C. T., A History of Discoveries at Halicarnassus, Cnidus, and Branchidae ii (1862).Google Scholar
MRG C. T. Newton, Mausoleum Room Guide, i.e. Synopsis of the Contents of the British Museum. Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities: Mausoleum Room (1886).
Riemann, H., ‘Pytheos’, RE xxiv. 1 (1963)Google Scholar
Note also that BMC Sculpture here refers to the ‘old’ Catalogue by A. H. Smith, vol. ii (1900).
1 Pliny, , HN xxxvi. 30.Google Scholar A useful survey of attributions is given by Donnay, G., G. Antiquité Classique xxvi (1957) 387 ff.Google Scholar Cf. Riemann 425 ff.
2 e.g. BMC Sculpture 65 ff.; Jeppesen, Kristian, Paradeigmata (Jutland Archaeological Society Publications iv, 1958) i ff.Google Scholar; Riemann 372–83; Ashmole, Bernard, Architect and Sculptor in Classical Greece (1972) 147 ff.Google Scholar
3 These drawings are now in the British Museum (Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities) and will be published in Relief Sculpture of the Mausoleum.
4 Letter of 24 June 1857, Papers 24.
5 Further Paper 2.
6 Hist. Disc. 242–3.
7 Letter of 3 April 1857, Papers 11.
8 BMC Sculpture 113 no. 1023.1–2. MRG 30. AD ii pl. 18 nos. 79–80.
9 BMC Sculpture 107 no. 1017. MRG 21. AD ii pl. 17 no. 71.
10 Ashmole, B., JHS lxxxix (1969) 22 ff.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
11 Mon Inst v. pl. 20 figs. 9–10.
12 MRG 14.
13 Mon Inst v. pl. 19 fig. 4: forehand of horse missing; MRG 21–2 no. 13: forehand attached.
14 The slabs are numbered according to BMC Sculpture. The same numbers identify the slabs in the photographs of the Amazon frieze, Jdl xxiv (1909) Beil. 1–2 to p. 171, where the numbers assigned to individual figures are repeated from AD ii pls. 17–18.
15 MRG 9.
16 MRG 11.
17 MRG 15.
18 MRG 17.
19 This join seems to postdate Newton's activities, since the fragment is mentioned neither in MRG 18–19 no. 8 nor in BMC Sculpture 105 no. 1013. It is, however, illustrated in Jdl xxiv (1909) Beil. 1 to p. 171, and was therefore presumably added between 1900 and 1909.
20 MRG 24.
21 Hist. Disc. 99.
22 MRG 37.