Leseprobe

35 Sarapis 2nd cent. CE Bronze; height 40 cm (without base) Acquired from the Martinetti Collection, Rome, in 1877 Inv. no. ZV 30.15 The statuette is believed to have been discovered in Alexandria. It depicts a god who first emerged during the reign of Ptolemy I of Egypt in the period 320 to 300 BCE. Writing in his Exhortation to the Heathen in around 200 CE, Clement of Alexandria gives a rather fairy-tale account of the first cult statue of this deity, which was erected in his home city: ‘Athenodor says that Bryaxis used a mix of all kinds of materials for the artwork. For he had filings of gold, silver, copper, iron, and lead, as well as tin; and of Egyptian stones not one was wanting, and there were fragments of sapphire, and hematite, and emerald, and topaz. Having ground down and mixed together all these ingredients, he gave to the composition a blue colour, whence the darkish hue of the image; and having mixed the whole with the colouring matter that was left over from the funeral of Osiris and Apis, moulded the Serapis.’ An array of surviving large-scale heads very probably give a good idea of how Bryaxis’s colossal statue must have looked. In contrast to Bryaxis’s statue, however, the Dresden Serapis is shown standing. He wears on his head the modius , a measure for cereals, as a symbol of the god’s responsibility for the fertility of the land. Cerberus, the three-headed dog and guard of the underworld, would have once sat to the figure’s right.  |  sk