Czére Andrea szerk.: A Szépművészeti Múzeum közleményei (Budapest, 2007)

ANNUAL REPORT - A 2007. ÉV - MARIANNA DAGI: Highlighted Works of Art: Chamber Exhibitions Organized by the Collection of Classical Antiquities

of the relief raises his hand in a gesture of greeting or worship. The scene is framed on both sides by a snake between branches. The pillars and architrave show that the depicted scene is set in a sacred space: it fits into a well-established Greek iconographie scheme for representing the rider-hero and his worshippers. In the European tradition, the idea of the hero is bound up first and foremost with the heroes of the Homeric epic. By the Hellenistic period, however, the meaning of the word had become much broader. The term "hero" was extended to men who had died recently and who were recipients of a memorial cult, although it could also simply mean 'deceased'. The rider on the Collection's relief is one popular form of hero-representation. Such rider-hero reliefs clearly demonstrate the connection between the cults of the heroes and the dead, and only their inscriptions allow us to determine whether the object is a funeral or votive relief. In those cases where there is no inscription, as on the Budapest relief, all that can be ascertained is that the architectural frame points to a temple, the two trees to a hero's grove, and the snakes, as chthonic symbols, to the hero's world, and the cloaked man represents the worshippers. The representation thus hints at the dead man's survival in memory. A unique terracotta lampstand recently arrived in our Collection. It seems to be an architectural model representing a temple. The piece, which was at the centre of the summer exhibition, shows a bull standing in a gate with dove-like birds perched on top. Both sides of the doorjambs are decorated with a pair of horns and incised zigzags. Traces of burning show that the lamp, which is attached to the top of the gate, was once used. Architectural models decorated with sculpted animal and human figures were made in the eastern half of the Mediterranean world in the second millennium and the early first millennium BC. Similar animal figures, both terracotta and bronze, have been found in this area that date to the late Bronze Age and the early Iron Age. The modelling of the birds and the bull points to a provenance in the ancient Levant, and a date between 1600-1100 BC. This model shrine is of Canaanite origin. The bull and the dove symbolize two important gods of the Canaanite pantheon: Baal, the god of war, and Astarte, the goddess of love. The appearance of their sacred animals on a single lampstand perhaps attests that the temple, where the lamp once provided light, was dedicated to both gods. In autumn 2007 we had our first opportunity in the history of the series to present the art of an ancient city. Teano, a small town on the northern border of Campania, a province in southern Italy, is famous because it was the place of a "historical handshake": in October 1860, Garibaldi met King Victor Emmanuel II and recognised him as king of a united Italy. The territory of the ancient Teanum Sidicinum fell into the hands of the Sidicini, an Oscan-speaking Italic people, in the sixth century BC: the city itself emerged in the fourth century. However,