Relationships between Style and Size of Statuary and the Availability of Marble at Cyrene

Abstract

The statuary from Cyrene present an invaluable opportunity to examine questions about the supply of marble in antiquity. Lacking native marble deposits, it was necessary to import all the marble needed for the city’s statuary and architecture. This paper is part of an ongoing program to provide information about this important provincial city’s sculpture both as an art form and as a commercial commodity. It extends earlier analysis of the physico-chemical and stylistic data collected on marble sculpture from Cyrene, Libya. Previous work discussed not only the specific connections between Cyrenaica and certain white marble quarries of the Mediterranean (Herz et al., 1985), but also raised the question of whether the marble was imported in blocks or as finished works (Kane, 1988). The analyses of the statuary presented here seek to determine whether or not there is a link between the availability of certain size blocks and a previously noted frequency of certain size formats.