MEMORIAL MONUMENT
of Dionysius Skianthi
Uffizi Gallery inv.988
first half of the I Century A.C.

The place of provenance and the year or the century of “birth” of this funerary monument, erected in memory of a freedman of greek origins, Dionysus Skianthi, are not known even nowdays. We can find documents on its transportation to the Medici Riccardi Palce from the 18th century. It has been kept during the 19th century in the Sala delle Iscizioni.



The monument, sculpted from greek marble, is one of the most refined and precious exemples known of the so called festoon altars. The bas-relief decorations on the front and on the sides are of particular excellence, both for the artistic quality and the symbolic choice of the represented motives.



On the front side, the fight of cocks surely refers to the energy and the physical and also moral force of the defunct during his life, that can even guarantee him appreciation afterlife.



Even the defunct is represented during his travel through the sea, transported softly on the back of a imaginary sea animal, kind of a huge snake, that would help him to cross the unfathomable border between life and death, which frightens, but in the same time fascinate human beings.



On the sides, we can see birds around a butterfly, symbol of psyche according to ancients. The quality and the beutiy of the flowers and fruits that always accompanied ritual ceremonies for defuncts now almost invisible because of the bad condition and the dirtiness that marks the monument.The cleaning and the restoration would allow to understand the imagination and the skills that characterized the roman lapidary workshops in the first half of the first century a.c