Featured Cameos, one signed, please help!

we need her...she's a force of nature here !!!!

 

Dear Simona,
I have been traveling for a few months and not keeping up with the posts. The cameos are beautiful. I was watching that first one, which is superb. I am glad you got it. It seems to me that there is a se ong, fainter signature on your cameo (just above the Parafini). Could you please take a few more pictures? I did a quick check and could not find a carver by that name. Maybe the other signature will give a clue?

 

What a lovely batch to behold. The one I know best is the winged lady leading 4 horses. She has her origin in the silver denarius struck by the moneyer L. Plautius Plancus in the Roman Republican era. There are two schools of thought about who she is.

One is that she is Victory leading a quadriga (which can be a chariot drawn by 4 horses or a team of 4 horses) into the heavens. This ties in with the notion that the image on the coin is copied from an ancient painting by Nicomachus of Thebes that his brother, L. Munatius Plancus was said to have dedicated to the Temple of Jupiter. Pliny the Elder gave the painting the descriptive title Victoria quadrigam in sublime rapiens; the coin might also be described this way, depending on how you translate quadrigam and rapiens. There is a sort of skewed logic that we know how the painting looked because we have this coin and that we have this coin because that's how the painting looked. And that even though there was a suspicion that Munatius arranged to have his brother put on the list of those proscribed & slated for death, the moneyer, who was executed for his sybaritic ways, chose this image connected to his general-politician brother for the reverse of his coin.

In the other account she is Aurora, the Dawn, leading the 4 Horses of the Sun, and the Medusa head/gorgoneion on the obverse is a mask. The way this goes, the flute players who provided music for religious events went on strike and fled Rome. Usually the account of this rebellion cited in explanation of the coin is the one by Ovid in Fasti. You can read more about it here, but the relevant bit is:

And now the wain [carrying the drunken flutists] had entered the city of Rome by the Esquiline, and at morn it stood in the middle of the Forum. In order to deceive the Senate as to their persons and their number, Plautius [an ancestor of L. Plautius Plancus' adoptive family] commanded that their faces should be covered with masks... In that way he thought that the return of the exiles could be best concealed, lest they should be censured for having come back against the orders of their guild.

The rationale for the coin imagery being based on this tale is that the obverse alludes to the masks and the reverse to the action's having occurred at dawn, L. Plautius Plancus having chosen it for the Plautian connection. I find this explanation to be reaching just a little.

Muddying the waters, in addition to the reins of the horses, the lady holds in her hand an object that in some iterations looks like a torch (1 point for Aurora), in some clearly looks like a palm frond (1 for Victory), and in some sorta-kinda looks like a palm frond.

One of the prize holdings of the Hermitage is this cameo, believed to be copied from the coin, dated to the first century BCE, signed as being by Rufus:



What she holds is more easily seen in this grisaille enamel version:



But also:



It may be the version by Luigi Pichler that introduced the wispier frond:



As for the evidence of the coins, many examples are too worn/blurry to show this detail, and there is more than one version of the coin. Some of the sharpest look like this:



Victory is a fairly common motif on Roman coins, along with depictions of emperors. Aurora really would be a departure. A search for Roman coins with Medusa turns up a number of them. A search for Aurora mostly turns up this one.

Either way, it makes for a beautiful coin and a beautiful cameo.

 

Random short remarks.

I would go with Dionysus rather than with a maenad/bacchante for that one. Figure is a bit too covered up to be female.

Have seen versions of the little one but of course can't find an example just now. Think it would be described as 'seated woman contemplating a vase', although not hard to see a mourning theme there.

Athena's helmet is often described as being 'satyr-faced'.

The seated winged female cameo is very odd. What is that disembodied head on her left? She wears a Venus knot hairdo, holds a kithara in her left hand and ___? in her right.

I adore the Aurora, with all her little psyche helpers and the one cupid making off with a cornucopia of flowers. She shares some features with the Aurora of Guido Reni, but this carver has opened up her pose and surrounded her with little helpers. I am getting nowhere with the signature. I think t or l are more likely than f for the middle letter; following that notion wasn't fruitful. Most of my searches these days are not fruitful. I tried to work out what is written about that, only feel sure about the M at the beginning.

 

Dear @Bronwen,

This message truly made my day!

After such a long time, I was genuinely relieved and so happy to see your name pop up. More than anything, I hope you're doing well and taking good care of yourself. It's wonderful to have you back.

And thank you so much for your comments, they are as thoughtful and insightful as ever.
Aurora and little Cupid cameo, has 2 signatures, one I am quite sure is Michelini’s , I will try taking few more photos. The name Parafini, did not bring any results for me either, this signature is the prominent one.
Thank you.❤️
Sending you my very best,
Simona