By Caroline Roberts, Conservator
Greetings Earthlings! We have another feature from our NEH-sponsored Color research project this month—another Isis Aphrodite! This time she has taken the form of a small-but-mighty polychrome figurine from Karanis. Our graduate assistant Laurel Fricker did some sleuthing and discovered that this may be an Isis Aphrodite Anasyromene, or Aphrodite lifting up her skirt. Hers isn’t exactly a skirt—more like a robe—and it is painted purple. Purple paint is a source of intrigue to scientists. You could produce it in a lot of different ways, by combining a variety of red, pink, blue, and black pigments. Sorting these mixtures out can present a challenge when investigating purple on artifacts. The purple on this Aphrodite is one of only two instances of this color we’ve found on a painted object from Karanis. It’s a mixture of rose madder and another unidentified pigment—we’re still working on figuring this out.
Having studied over 100 objects from Karanis and Terenouthis, it’s interesting that we’ve found such a small number of purple-painted pieces (only three total!). Not sure what this means yet, but stay tuned!
How alluring! How small is she? Did I miss a scale indication? Was purple not a culturally popular color; was the pigment difficult to make; or did a component of the pigment quickly degrade? So many questions. How/why were small figurines such as this one used?
Thank you for your questions! The figurine is about 7 centimeters tall, so it’s small compared to other terracotta figurines from Karanis. Purple was a color associated with luxury and high status in the Roman world, so while not necessarily ‘popular’ (i.e. worn by everyone) it certainly had cultural capital. Purple pigment could be made a number of different ways, so it wasn’t difficult to produce, which makes its relative rarity in the Karanis collection rather intriguing. Madder lake is a common component in purples found on other Roman Egyptian artifacts such as Fayoum portraits, and while as an organic dye it would have been sensitive to natural light fading, it is often pretty well preserved. I understand that many of these figurines had a devotional purpose and would have been kept in the home–but this is a better question for our curator Terry Wilfong!