Dr Tiziana D’Angelo
While snow settled around the magisterial courts of Queens’ College on Monday night, inside Dr Tiziana D’Angelo treated the Classics society to a sunnier Mediterranean experience, as she addressed the society on Hellenistic funerary rites in Southern Italy. Her paper ‘Silent Mourners: Terracotta Statues and Death Ritual in Ancient Apulia’ focused on a collection of 48 half-life-size terracotta statues from the family tombs in Canosa, and provided suggestions for their function. Dr D’Angelo argued convincingly that the statues were ‘participant actors’ in the funerary rites of the Daunian families.
The paper began by contextualizing the excavation of the Daunian tombs – some of the tombs were in fact discovered twice, after local landowners uncovered them, plundered their goods, backfilled the burial sites and then subsequently forgot where they were located. Next, Dr D’Angelo explored the artistry and gestures of the statues. Past scholarship had divided the statues based on the typologies of their garments, but the new groups proposed were based on the gestures of the figures. Some of the figures had raised arms, some with downward facing palms, and some in typical poses of lamentation; Dr D’Angelo was insistent that the gestures of these figures were neither solely for lamentation, nor for prayer, but in fact that these two aspects of the funerary cult should be understood together.
A discussion on a set of mysterious holes on the bases of these statues segued neatly into a broader discussion on the ritual purpose of these figures. It was suggested that the figures could have been bolted onto moveable carts and brought in procession – this image was irreverently (and to great amusement) referred to as the ‘lady on skateboard’ figure type, a typology which was debated at length over drinks after the talk had finished. The dignity and respect of these silent mourners is in line with contemporary ritual changes of the third century B.C.: funerary rituals had become less elaborate by law since the fifth century, and certainly on this brink of Romanisation the large grave amphorae and askoi of the past were being replaced by smaller and more dignified vessels. The silence of the mourner figures, Dr D’Angelo argued, was representative of these social changes in ritual, and can help to provide a dialogue on the responsibilities of women in funerary ritual during this period of change.
Ultimately, the Canosan terracottas were ‘ritual experiments’, which lasted for only two or three generations of family burials, and their form was not copied outside the Daunian region. They remain a tantalising enigma in Italian archaeology, but Dr D’Angelo demonstrated with much flair how they can still provide a valid commentary on ritual, social and artistic practice in the Hellenistic period. The paper challenged us to think about the function of art and artefact in context, while keeping social change as a clear back-drop to the discussion. We now eagerly await the sequel paper, which will explore more thoroughly the ‘lady on skateboard’!
Michael Loy
Queens’ College, Cambridge
The Queens’ Classics Society will return on Wednesday 18th February at 7:00p.m. in the Fitzpatrick Hall. David Butterfield, Fran Middleton, Stephen Oakley and Tim Whitmarsh will go head to head in a balloon debate entitled ‘The Fire of the Library of Alexandria’.
