Aquileia Dish
Roman relief silver plate from around 30 BC believed to depict the family of Antony and Cleopatra
The Aquileia Dish is an ancient originally gilded silver plate found in Aquileia though its original place of creation is unknown and the subject of debate. It is now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. It is decorated with a relief of several mythological figures, which are often believed to represent real life persons, though their exact identification are disputed. A common theory is that it was created for the Egyptian royal couple Cleopatra and Mark Antony, who may be depicted on the relief in the guise of the deities Demeter and Triptolemos, along with their three children.
Provenance
The modern provenance of the piece begins with its discovery by count Ignaz Franz de Cassis during the early 19th century in a monastery near Aquileia. Cassis gave it to Francis II, Holy Roman Emperor, who then donated it to the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna in 1825.
Subject
The relief depicts eleven human figures, two men, six women, and three children. Of the figures only the central one is identified by the museum, naming him as Triptolemos, which several scholars agree with. The woman next to him is likely Demeter, whom he was the consort of in classical mythology. Variously the children have been identified as the offspring of a Roman emperor, standing with their father (in the guise of Triptolemos) as he performs religious sacrifices.
The public source identifies “Aquileia Dish” as roman relief silver plate from around 30 BC believed to depict the family of Antony and Cleopatra. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Aquileia, Dish and Roman.
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This entry incorporates text from “Aquileia Dish” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.