Fragment from a sarcophagus (00008)
Exhibition room: I.1 Old forms-New symbols
Date: ca 215
Dimensions (cm): 0,77x0,88x0,29
Fragment from a marble, columnar sarcophagus from Smyrna in Asia Minor. It is decorated with a boar hunt featuring two men, one on foot and the other on horseback, and a pack of hounds. The figures, almost in the round, emerge from an architectural background, in which some of the details have been made using a drill. The hunting scene is a subject frequently used in the iconography of Late Antique sarcophagi with the intention of highlighting the bravery of the deceased. It has been suggested that this fragment belongs with four others exhibited in the Byzantine Museum and another nine in the British Museum.