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A Roman (?) Head at Dumfries1
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 September 2012
Extract
The striking and enigmatic stone head reproduced on plate IX, nos. 2, 3, and fig. 3 (p. 64), was presented to the Dumfries Burgh Museum in September, 1951, along with two Roman altars. These three objects had been preserved at Burnfoot House, Birrens, Annandale, for over a century, and had always been together within the memory of living members of the Irving family, which owned the property until 1950. One of the altars, that of Minerva, was dug up in 1810 during stone-robbing in the vicus of the Birrens Roman fort: the smaller altar, that of Fortuna, came to light on the same site in 1886. There is further a local tradition of the finding of a head, described as being that of Jupiter, at Birrens c. 1816, also in the course of stone-robbing; but no evidence exists for equating with it the head which is the subject of this note, since the provenance of the latter is not recorded.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright
- Copyright © J. M. C. Toynbee 1952. Exclusive Licence to Publish: The Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies
Footnotes
1
I have to thank Mr. A. E. Truckell, Curator of the Dumfries Burgh Museum, for drawing my attention to this head, for sending it to Cambridge for my inspection, and for kindly permitting me to publish it in this Journal. Cf. Dumfriesshire and Galloway Nat. Hist, and Ant. Soc. Trans., ser. 3, XXIX, 1950–1, 139–40.
References
2 Proc. Soc. Ant. Scot., ser. 3, VI, 1895–6, 152–3, no. 16, figs. 21–3.
3 ibid., 159, no. 21, fig. 28.
4 J. Macdonald and J. Barbour, Birrens and its Antiquities, 1897, 15. For two other, certainly Roman, heads carved in the round from Annandale, one from Middleby, the other from Birrens, see Proc. Soc. Ant. Scot., ser. 3, VI, 1895–6, 198, figs. 49, 50.
5 I owe this information to Miss Marjorie Sweeting, formerly Research Fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge, now Lecturer in Geography at St. Hugh's College, Oxford.
6 W. von Massow, Die Grabdenkmäler von Neumagen, 1932, Text 177, no. 193, pl. 66, no. 193a.
7 Delbrueck, R., ‘Bronzener Frauenkopf, um 400 n.Ch.’ (Bonner Jahrbücher, CL, 1950, 87–90, pls. 2, 3)Google Scholar. The head is slightly less than half life-size.
8 Compare a similar tag, for securing the vast ‘tea-cosy’ headdress, visible on the right cheek of the left-hand matrona on the famous Matronae Aufaniae relief, carved in A.D. 164, in the Rheinisches Landesmuseum, Bonn (Bonner Jahrbücher, CXXXV, 1930, 11Google Scholar, no. 19, pl. 8). I prefer this interpretation of the jutting object to that of Professor Delbrueck, who describes it as an earpick (Ohrlöffel). A small tag seems to be incised just in front of the right ear on the Neumagen head.
9 Jahreshefte Öst. Arch. Inst. in Wien, XXXVIII, 1950, 181–2, fig. 61Google Scholar.
10 Proc. Soc. Ant. Scot., ser. 6, XII, 1937–8, 275 ff.
11 For the occupation of Birrens from the first (?), to the first half of the fourth, century see ibid., 344–7.
12 In this connection it is of interest to record the impression made by photographs of the Dumfries head upon Prof. Dr. Fremersdorf, Director of the Römisch-Germanisches Museum, Köln. In a letter dated 9th May, 1952, he wrote: ‘Was die übersandten Photos des Kopf anbelangt, so muss auch ich sagen dass es sich um ein sehr merkwürdiges Stück handelt, für das es meines Erachtens keine direkte Parallele geben durfte. Aber die nur im ganz grossen durchgeführte Bearbeitung und die Art der Augen erinnert mich an gewisse Denkmäler der Spät-Latènezeit. Ich möchte fest glauben, dass bei Ihrem Stück solche Reminiszenzen vorliegen.’ Prof. Fremersdorf has also drawn my attention to a late La Tène male head from Czechoslovakia, published by Jan Filip in La Tchécoslovaquie préhistorique, 1948, pl. 38, which shows protruding eyes and a similarly unworked appearance behind. But the contrast between its barbaric, geometric cubism and the naturalistic plasticity of the Dumfries head springs to the eye immediately.