Statuette of Hygieia

The small sculpture depicts a draped, standing female figure that can be identified with Hygieia for the presence of the snake, as an attribute, twining with its coils round the right arm, as visible in the preserved parts. Both hands and parts of the snake are broken. Hygieia is more frequently considered the daughter of Asclepius (according to another tradition she was one of the Hesperides) and in the Latin world she is identified with Salus or Valetudo. The statuette is placed over a base (w. 24 cm; d. 17.5 cm), carved in the same marble block, which has curved sides and a plain panel on the front.

The figure of Hygieia is arranged frontally, with the right leg bearing the weight and the left slightly bent and pushed sideways to the front; the bust follows the inclination of such natural ponderation with the left shoulder little raised, while the right lowers in relation to the weight-bearing leg; both arms are stretched forward and bent: the right forearm is enveloped by snake’s coils which was thus guided by the right hand of the maiden, now missing, towards the phiale held in the left hand, also broken.

The head, gently inclined, is turned towards the left to observe the movement that the reptile is about to make; the hair has a parting in the middle that divides it in two bulgy bands of thick, wavy and well outlined locks then gathered in a bun, and that leaves the ears uncovered, according to the typical hairstyle of the IV century BC. Above the forehead she wears a half-moon shaped diadem, and two lightly carved locks of hair fall at either side of the parting at the centre of the forehead, while others, escaping the hair-do, appear close to the ears. The small and oval face is well outlined, with a flat ridge nose whose line continues into the wide and regular eyebrows with supraorbital foramens; the mouth is small, closed, with the lower lip fleshy and with a receding chin.

Hygieia wears a sleeved chiton overlapped by a Doric peplos, pinned over the shoulders with two buttons and belted at the waist below the wide kolpos, the latter softly falling under the apoptygma in numerous folds and, at the sides, resting on the hips. The dress is open on the right side, where the two close hems fall in deep zigzagging creases as they are pulled down by a pair of plammets which hold down also the apoptygma. The rich peplos with numerous folds, underlined by deep carvings, reaches the floor leaving only the toes uncovered.

Formal characteristics allow to assign this type of peplophoros to the sphere of Roman copies of Hellenistic remakes. The simultaneous use of chiton and peplos cannot belong to a model of the Classical age, just like the long kolpos not yet overweighed by the short apoptygma. To such sphere belongs, on the contrary, the small statuette of Hygieia from the Sanctuary of Asclepios in Kos, now in Istanbul, that shares with ours the same iconographic scheme, having both arms stretched out and a lost attribute in the hole of her left arm. Recognized by M. Bieber as an original sculpture of the early Hellenistic period produced under the influence of works of the post-praxitelic stream, this statue derives from the same reference model used for our statuette of Hygieia.

Of the portrayals of standing Hygieia in the same iconographic type, with the bent arms stretched outwards, with the right forearm enveloped by the snake’s coils and with the phiale in the left hand, one can be found in the British Museum, coming from the temple of Apollo in Cyrene; one was formerly in the Giustiniani Collection, as shown by a print in the Casanatense Library; and in the Regional Archaeological Museum “A. Salinas” of Palermo, formerly Cavaceppi Collection, is housed a I century BC exemplar that closely resembles our Hygieia though it is of inferior quality.

It is difficult to detect a precise chronological setting, yet it seems possible to date our sculpture around the middle of the I - middle of the II century AD, in consideration of the comparisons made, of the use of the precious Parian marble, as well as of the refined glance and of the delicate features of the face.