Serapis and Cerberus

Roman art

This sculpture group depicts the god Serapis sitting on a plain, high-backed throne, with his sandalled feet resting on a low wooden stool. The figure wears a long tunic beneath a mantle. In his raised left hand, he holds a sceptre, and his right hand, which faces outward, holds a (restored) patera. The head, which is not ancient, was inspired by the typical iconography of the god. To his right is Cerberus, a three-headed animal, in a frontal pose and with a snake-like tail wrapped around its body. The god’s right hand probably originally rested on the animal’s middle head.

Acquired in 1609 with the Della Porta Collection, it was recorded in the Borghese family’s city residence in 1610. In 1650, Iacomo Manilli described it as ‘Pluto seated with the dog Cerberus near his seat’ and located in enclosure two, along Viale dei Cipressi. In 1828, it was restored by Antonio d’Este, who described it in the same way. In 1891, Wolfang Helbig identified it as Serapis with Cerberus. The statue is one of numerous Roman copies, dating to the second century CE, of the famous statue of Serapis in the Serapeum of Alexandria, attributed to the sculptor Bryaxis, who was active towards the end of the fourth century BCE.

Object details

Commentary

This sculpture group came from the Della Porta Collection, which was purchased in 1609 by Giovanni Battista Borghese. In 1610, it is mentioned in the family’s city residence (De Lachenal 1982, p. 66: Appendice Va., no. 224; Appendice Vb. no. 187, Appendice VI., no. 68). In 1650, Iacomo Manilli described it as ‘Pluto seated with the dog Cerberus near his seat’ and located in enclosure two, along Viale dei Cipressi, along with four other statues of seated figures (Manilli 1650, p. 124). In 1832, following Manilli’s description, Antonio Nibby listed it as ‘Pluto’, dating it to the Antonine Age, and supplementing the description with detailed historical research on the god. The scholar also advanced a hypothesis, which later turned out to be incorrect, that it came from Tarentum, a sacred place devoted to the god of the underworld, located between the church of S. Lorenzo in Lucina and Piazza del Clementino, where Palazzo Borghese once stood (Nibby 1832, pp. 127–130, no. 6, pl. 39). In 1828, the statue was in Antonio d’Este’s study as reported in the ‘Quinta Nota degli Oggetti Antichi provenienti dalla Villa Borghese’, which lists it as a ‘Seated Statue of Pluto’ (Moreno, Sforzini 1987, pp. 361–362). In 1891, Wolfang Helbig identified the statue as a representation of Serapis and a copy of the original by the sculptor Bryaxis in the Serapeum of Alexandria. In 1925, Walther Amelung furthered Helbig’s analysis, concentrating on the figure of Cerberus (Amelung 1913, pp. 251–252, no. 1563). According to Macrobius, the animal’s three heads (a wolf, a lion and a dog) symbolically represent the tripartite division of Time into past, present and future, with Serapis as the Sun (Macrobius, Saturn., 1.20.13). In an exhaustive study of the god and Cerberus in particular, aimed to reconstruct the Alexandrian original and published in 1973, Wilhelm Hornbostel identified two typological categories for the animal: the first, more common, depicting him with the heads of three different types of dog; the second, rarer, with a lion head. The latter category includes the Borghese sculpture (Hornbostel 1973, p. 94, pl. XVIII, no. 26), a relief in the Capitoline Museum (p. 93, note 1, fig. 191) and a statuette in Ince Blundell Hall (Ashmole 1929, no. 39, pl. 18).

The god is portrayed seated on a plain throne with a high, broad back and a low stool; he wears a long unbelted tunic and a mantle that falls from his left shoulder over his chest and ends elegantly draped over his legs. He wears sandals called krepídes on his feet. His left arm is raised to hold the sceptre and his right arm, restored, is bent and facing forward, his hand holding a patera. The head, which is not ancient, reproduces the physiognomic features typical of the god’s iconography. To his right is Cerberus, a three-headed animal, the body of which is encircled by a serpent that starts from its tail.

According to Silvio Ferri, in 1962, and Hans von Steuben, slightly later, the right hand of the god must have, presumably, rested on the animal’s middle head, a pose that seems to be confirmed by visible traces of the attachment.

As already observed by Helbig, the statue is one of the numerous Hellenistic and Roman copies of the original sculpture group carved in the fourth century BCE for the Serapeum of Alexandria and attributed to Bryaxis. Among them, three comparable to the present sculpture are one in the Capitoline Museum (Stuart 1912, pp. 81–82, no. 3, pl. XXXIV; Ensoli Vittozzi 1993, pp. 239–240, n. 24), one in the Museo Chiaramonti, Vatican City (Amelung 1903, p. 360, no. 74) and one in the Museo Archeologico, Naples (Ruesch 1908, p. 188, no. 705).

The harmonically balanced composition and complex rendering of the drapery suggests a date for the Borghese sculpture in the second century CE.

Giulia Ciccarello