Contemporary and late acceptance of stylistic, fashionable and structural characteristics on tomb stellai in Dalmatia

Abstract

The aim of this article is to establish if there was any lag in contemporary fashionable, stylistic and structural characteristics of portraits and forms of tomb monuments in Dalmatia in comparison io similar movements in big centers of the Greek and Roman world. The mentioned process in analyzed on five examples. On the stelle of Gaius Utius (fig. 1) we have figures of man and woman While the model for man’s hairstyle is from the last decade of the 1st c. B. C. (Marc Antony), the woman’s is from the late Augustian of early Tiberian period, thus it is not really certain when this stelle was made. On the stelle of Veronius Aetor from Ostrovice (fig. 2) the man is similar to Vespasian while it is harder to say anything for the woman since the henkerchief on her head is obviously an autonomous fashionable element. Their sons are probably depicted in the lower row. Their hairstyles remind us of Domitian (type I). All the figures were probably made at the same time only the parents follow their generational trait while the sons reflect their own. The third stelle (fig. 3) is a fragment with a figure of a young man in clipeus. He exibits Trajian type of hairstyle (type Mariemont 1250) but his eyes prominetly show the pupil and the iris which is a stylistic element from the Hadrian times. However, there is no lag here since the Trajanic hairstyle was still used during the rule of Hadrian. Tomb relief form Rupotina (fig. 4) presents a man with a beard and longish hair after the figure of Antoninus Pius and his spouse with the hairstyle of Faustina Minor or Lucilla. However the eye sockets do not show the pupil and the iris. The lack of such elements can be explained with the fact that classicistic modelling of portraits was still used although this was an old fashioned process at the time of Antoninus Pius. Finally, stelle five (fig. 5) from Sinj has not been published yet. The man has short hair and the woman the so-called Scheitelzopf hairstyle (3rd c. A.D.) Architectonic morphology of the stelle, however, is old fashioned for that time since such stellai were present in Dalmatia to the end of the 1st c. A.D. and they gradually disappear. The reason we find it in the hinterlands is probably because the sarcophagi, that became a dominant type of monumental tombstone already in the 2nd c., did not spread there so that stellai of bigger dimensions and architechtonic morphology were present in this region for a longer period.