A Roman vessel for cosmetics: form, decoration, and subjectivity in the muse Casket

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In 1793, laborers digging a well at the foot of the Esquiline hill in Rome came upon the ruins of an ancient house and buried therein what proved to be the largest and most spectacular silver treasure from antiquity discovered up to that time. The known surviving items of the so-called Esquiline Treasure—probably made in the second half of the fourth century CE and concealed by its last owners sometime in late antiquity to protect it from marauders or invading barbarians, but surely intended to have been recovered and reused by them—include some very famous pieces: the Projecta Casket, the Tyche statuettes of Rome, Constantinople, Antioch, and Alexandria, a number of dishes, spoons, and ewers (Figure 2.1). Among these is the Muse Casket, a circular vessel, just under 33 cm in diameter and a little less than 27 cm high when covered with its lid. It is made of sheet silver, shaped and decorated with repoussé and engraving. Its lid is a silver dome recessed from the edge of a flat rim and attached to the base by a soldered hinge, with a narrow tab opposite the hinge for raising and lowering the cover (Figure 2.2). Inside it has five smaller vessels for toiletries and cosmetics, so that the casket as a whole was made to be used as a container for unguents. The art of the toiletry box—as a vessel that contains other vessels—casts light onto a problem that is faced across cultures, namely, improving or elevating a person’s physical or spiritual state by operating a complex device—a container of containers—and using the contents stored therein. Different cultures may seek different symbolisms to structure the generation of meaning, based on their own specific traditions and ideologies. In the case of the Muse Casket, the artifactual logic—structured through the material invitation to open, close, and use a box, and to open, close, and use the containers within it—operates alongside an iconographic rhetoric of surface decoration that alludes to the divine, that is in this case, to the Muses and the Dionysiac sphere.

Authors: Elsner, J

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Host title: Vessels: The Object as Container
• Pages: 50-80
• Chapter number: 2
• Series: Visual Conversations in Art and Archaeology
• Place of publication: Oxford
• Publication date: 2020-11-01
• Edition: 1st
• DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198832577.003.0008
• EISBN: 9780192568731
• ISBN: 9780198832577
• Language: English