Seated Goddess in Porphyry, Minerva or Roma
Unknown · Second century AD
A goddess sits on a rock in a tunic and mantle of deep purple-red porphyry, the hardest and most imperial of stones, while her head, arms and one foot gleam in gilded bronze. The contrast was deliberate. Porphyry came from a single quarry in the Egyptian desert and was reserved for emperors, and Roman sculptors combined it with bronze or white marble for flesh, since the stone was almost impossible to carve in fine detail. The heavy folds over the knees and the scaly aegis on the chest are ancient; the aegis suggests Minerva, though the seated pose also fits Roma, the personified city.
The statue was found in Rome, in the garden of the church of San Martino ai Monti, and dates from the second century, in or after Hadrian's reign. It once wore a different helmeted head topped by a crouching sphinx. In a later restoration the body, broken at the waist, was rejoined, and a new bronze head copied from the Athena Giustiniani was fitted together with bronze arms and a foot. It came to the Louvre through the revolutionary seizures.
Did You Know? The bronze face is a modern copy of another famous statue, the Athena Giustiniani, fitted to an ancient porphyry body.
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