Roman Marble Sarcophagus Fragment

A trapezoidal fragment of a Roman marble sarcophagus relief carved with three young women, the daughters of King Lycomedes of Skyros. According to the myth, Thetis hid her son Achilles among the king’s daughters, disguised as a girl, to keep him from the Trojan War. Odysseus uncovered him by offering gifts and sounding a war trumpet, and Achilles revealed himself by seizing the weapons as the startled princesses fled. The maidens are sculpted in high relief, dressed in fine chitons that cling to their slender bodies and leave the shoulders and one breast bare. The central figure leans forward in motion, and behind them their veils billow in an arc, as if lifted by the wind. The relief rises almost to full round at the shoulders, where the heads, now lost, once projected, while the veils fade gently into the background. The result is a harmonious, almost atmospheric sense of space. The scene of Achilles on Skyros was a favourite subject of Roman sarcophagi. Comparable reliefs are held by the Musée du Louvre, the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Getty Villa. As the scholar Arthur Darby Nock argued, such heroic myths honoured the deceased, associating them with the glory of the heroes of Greek antiquity. The fragment is mounted on a tall black pedestal.