Seated Eros A

A hazelnut brown color (Munsell 7.5 yr 8/6), porous, with numerous reflective inclusions. Thick white slip with polychrome pigments preserved in a number of places: pink (upper section of the wings, complexion), black (hair), light blue (edge and lower part of the wings), and red (lips and straps). Made with bivalve molds.

There are losses at the tip of the left hand and the fret boards of the instrument; surface accretions and black stains appear overall. There is a small circular hole beneath the buttocks.

– 1988, Acanthus Gallery (New York, NY), sold to Barbara and Lawrence Fleischman (New York, NY), 1988; 1988–96, Barbara and Lawrence Fleischman (New York, NY), donated to the J. Paul Getty Museum, 1996.

Passion for Antiquities 1994, p. 355, no. 241a; Acquisitions 1996–98, p. 67.

The little nude winged Eros is shown seated. The left arm holds a small lyre pressed against the abdomen; the right hand holds a plektron. The bright, lively polychromy is spread over a layer of white slip.¹ Two faint red straps cross over the chest; the forms of the body are plump, with a prominent belly and a clearly marked navel, chubby legs, and short, spread wings. The figure’s back is flat. The face is round with delicate facial features, the eyes are slightly sunken, and the mouth is small and fleshy. The hair forms a curly mass over the forehead. For further discussion, see cat. 46.

Notes

Statuettes of a Seated Eros (cats. 45–46)

This discussion is reproduced on each of the individual object pages.

These musician Erotes must originally have been mounted on animals: beneath the buttocks, there are no traces of slip or polychromy. The typology is reminiscent of Daunian examples from Canosa in the third century BC, but it is also similar to the Erotes from the Hypogeum of Ganymede in Arpi. Unlike most of the Erotes from Arpi, however, these two still preserve their musical instruments.¹ The effeminate appearance of little Erotes like these is often accentuated, especially in terracotta statuettes, by such ornaments as necklaces and leg bands.

Eros, who in the Classical period is primarily a figure complementary to Aphrodite and Dionysos, enlarged his role in the Hellenistic period to become an interlocutor with the female world and a protector of marriage and female fertility, while continuing to operate in the sphere of Dionysos and Aphrodite in a broad array of situations, with the chief function of spreading good cheer and merriment. The type of the child Eros playing musical instruments was, beginning at the end of the fourth century and in the third century BC, widespread throughout the entire Mediterranean and became a point of reference in the iconography of goldwork and toreutics.² In the Daunian area and especially at Canosa, where there was a close relationship between coroplastic art and vase decoration, small Erotes were also attached to polychrome vases of the same period.³ There was an especially close link between Eros and music: in Attic vase-painting, Eros is often shown handing musical instruments to ephebes or watching a musical performance in the context of the gynaikeion (women’s quarters), while in the Hellenistic period Eros also accompanied the Muses, as documented by images on gems.⁴ Similar Erotes from the region of Daunia are now found in many major museum collections and frequently appear on the antiquities market, often in pairs and groups of four, as they must have originally been found in their source contexts.⁵

Notes