Vatican Museums

The fragmentary high-relief figures were unearthed by chance in 1835 during work to improve the area in front of the Gregorian Bridge on the River Aniene. The nineteenth-century report on the discovery refers, with characteristic imprecision, to “… six fragmentary groups of terracotta statues …”, all of them “… lacking head, hands and feet”. The figures decorated the pediment of a temple, as is shown by their size and projection (angled at an incline of around 20°), ensuring an adequate view from below. The incomplete state of the group of reliefs makes their interpretation uncertain, but a detail offers a clue: next to the fourth figure from the left there is a tree, from which the hind legs of a sheepskin hang, empty and inert. This hint to the iconography of the Golden Fleece would suggest the expedition of the Argonauts as the possible central theme of the pediment. The reconstruction presented in the hall is intended to offer merely a suggestion of the original collocation of the relief.