Clypeate, Image

CLYPEATE, IMAGE. - With the expression "imago clipeata," which is already found in Macrobius (Saturn., II, 3), one usually designates the figure or, more often, the half-bust of a person sculpted in relief or painted on a surface in the form of a shield. This type of portrait (εἰκὼν γραπτή ἐσόπλῳ), which originally arose in a Greek-Oriental milieu of the Hellenistic age as an image of a heroic character and later as a simple reproduction of the physiognomic features of great personages or of ordinary citizens, was widely employed by the Romans for funerary purposes throughout the entire imperial period. Its use is attested from the beginning of the 2nd century B.C.; Pliny indeed (Nat. hist., XXXV, 12) states that the consul Appius Claudius placed clipei with portraits of his ancestors in the temple of Bellona.

Particularly interesting are a relief in the Vatican museum and a painted sarcophagus from Kerch, because they show respectively the one the workshop of a sculptor with a marble-worker intent on finishing a clipeate portrait of a Roman woman, the other the studio of a painter who, after hanging two clipei with half-bust portraits on the wall, sits before an easel. The i. c. on Roman sarcophagi begin to become quite frequent from the age of the Antonines onward, and Christians too adopted them widely. On sarcophagi, however, the bust or busts of the deceased are generally not sculpted on a convex surface with a circular contour like that of a clipeus, but within a hemispherical cavity hollowed out most often in the center of the chest or less frequently on the lid, or else, but exceptionally, on one of the sides, as is seen in a Christian sarcophagus from Toulouse. Often the clipeus takes the form of a shell, thereby acquiring a greater aesthetic sense, on account of the highly decorative motif of the flutings and given that the volute near the hinge of the shell provides a graceful support for the bust or busts of the deceased. Not always, however, is the transformation of the clipeus into a shell fully accomplished; sometimes, in fact, the characteristic volute has remained at the bottom, but the cavity is devoid of flutings. At other times the clipei with the busts of the deceased are supported by genii, by flying erotes, by victories, etc., but much more frequent are those not supported by any figure, that is, set into the center of the chest of the sarcophagus whether the latter is strigilated or decorated with a continuous frieze. When, moreover, the front of the sarcophagus is divided into two horizontal zones, the clipeus is usually found in the upper register, though it often encroaches, at least in part, on the lower one as well. As two triangular spaces form to the right and left at the point where the terminal fillet of the chest of the sarcophagus meets the upper part of the clipeus, the Christian sculptors ingeniously thought to fill these corners with figures of small volume that could find a justifiable place in the upper part of the scenes represented; since the figure of the hand of God emerging from the clouds to stay the arm of Abraham or to deliver the tablets of the Law to Moses suited the purpose well, for this reason at the sides of the clipei these two Old Testament scenes are found almost constantly: the sacrifice of Abraham and the revelation of Sinai. Christian art moreover used the i. c. in the paintings of the catacombs to depict there often the bust of Christ (as is seen, for example, in the vault of the arcosolium of Celerina in the cemetery of Pretestato); in the paintings of the basilicas to insert there the busts of the saints or (as at St. Paul Outside the Walls) the busts of the pontiffs; in mosaics to make stand out there (as is frequently seen in the center of Byzantine domes) the hieratic bust of the Pantocrator.

Giuseppe Bovini