THE SOURCE OF CLASSICAL MARBLE SCULPTURES IN THE MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, BOSTON: AN UPDATE


The provenance of Greek and Roman sculptures is significant to Classical scholars because in addition to revealing where the raw material for a particular object or fragment was quarried, it sheds light on economic and artistic aspects of marble use in antiquity. Our approach has emphasized the identification of the quarry source of as many sculptures as possible using only minimally destructive techniques. Stable carbon and oxygen isotope analysis is the best single method for determining marble provenance, but the quarry source can be unequivocally identified only 25% of the time. When supplemented by petrography and cathodoluminescence, isotopic overlap may be resolved, but these methods require the removal of a substantial solid sample - which is just not possible on most museum pieces. Rather, the minimally-destructive isotopic method (1 mg of unweathered marble is sufficient) is preferably combined with x-ray diffraction, grain-size determination, stylistic analysis, literary information, and archaeological data in order to narrow the choices among overlapping isotope data fields.

We report here on the analysis of an additional 60 Greek and Roman marble sculptures in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, to add to the 83 presented at ASMOSIA III. Our results demonstrate the utility of these complementary methods, and highlight the effectiveness of integrated, interdisciplinary research efforts. In many instances, initial identifications made by informed visual inspection were confirmed by the laboratory analyses; in others, the new identifications have considerable archaeological and art historical significance.

The source of a piece of marble is only the first step toward understanding the circumstances which transformed that piece into a work of art, an understanding that will only be achieved through the successful integration of analytical, archaeological, and artistic data on a very large number of marble sculptures. Our growing database should reflect the overall distribution history of each marble source, and will eventually permit the study of marble exploitation within specific socio-economic and historical contexts.