A MONUMENTAL TWO-HEADED ROMAN BUST AT BONHAMS | April 20th 2008

Bonhams                                                   

An ancient marble bust with delicate details and a curious provenance goes on sale next month. Fiammetta Rocco, Books and Arts editor of The Economist, explains why it may sell for a song ...

From ECONOMIST.COM*

Somerset Struben de Chair was an adventurous young British soldier stationed with the Royal Horse Guards in Palestine when he saw a larger-than-life marble bust displayed in the shop-window of an antique dealer named Ohan, opposite the King David Hotel in Jerusalem.

It was 1941 and the second world war had been going for two years. On entering the shop de Chair was startled to find that the bust was actually a double-headed figure; on one side was the face of Bacchus (or Dionysus as he is more often called) and on the other a garlanded Ariadne.

"After many visits and many cups of black coffee," he wrote in his diary, "I entered into a contract with Ohan, under which I paid a ten per cent deposit and gave my executors 18 months to pay the balance and collect it if I did not return from the battlefield."

Shortly after negotiating the bust's purchase, de Chair left Jerusalem to serve as an intelligence officer during the capture of Baghdad. He was wounded when the ruins of Palmyra came under fire from Italian and Vichy French forces, and evacuated back to Jerusalem.

While convalescing, he obtained an export licence for the bust. The marble was taken to the Rockefeller Museum, where a full-size plaster cast was taken, which is still on show there today. The bust was then packed and shipped home to Britain as "Wounded Officer's Kit".

After the war de Chair had a colourful career. He wrote poetry and novels, and became a right-wing Conservative member of parliament. He married four times. His last wife, Lady Juliet Wentworth-Stanley, brought a substantial inheritance to the marriage, including a £20m ($39.5m) art collection that included George Stubbs's magnificent "Whistlejacket", which the National Gallery bought in 1997.

Through it all the Roman bust (or herm: a statue that has a human head placed on a rectangular pillow and is used for architectural decoration) was the centrepiece of the main entrance hall of de Chair's home at Chilham Castle in Kent and later at St Osyth's Priory in Essex, where he lived until his death at the age of 84.

In the early 1980s, de Chair had the herm cleaned. It revealed that the bust had been carved from marmo lunense, a white marble from the quarries near the Italian town of Carrara, which has bluish-violet streaks which look like the moon on a cloudy night.

Both faces have shapely lips that are slightly parted, revealing their teeth. The noses are straight and the brows arched. But what is notable about the faces are the obvious tear ducts and the irises that are carved in a crescent. It is as if Ariadne is looking up at her lover, about to speak.

The herm was probably made as a special commission for the settlement of Beth Shan, just south of the Sea of Galilee, where it would have been used to mark a crossroads or a market corner, or on a doorway or entrance.

Situated on the main trade route to the Mediterranean, Beth Shan grew under Egyptian rule and later during the Bronze Age. Alexander the Great renamed it Scythopolis ("city of the Scythians") and made it one of the ten cities of the Decapolis.

By the first century AD it had become one of Palestine's most important cities, with colonnaded streets, many buildings and a theatre that could hold 7,000 people. Beth Shan continued to flourish through the later Roman and Byzantine period until an earthquake levelled it on January 18th 749.

De Chair's herm dates from shortly after Alexander's time. It is not the finest of carvings, but the noses are long and elegant and the hair, with its garlands of leaves and berries, is in very good condition. Bonhams estimates a price in line with recent sales, and lower than if this were a Hellenistic rather than a Roman statue--proof that even a beautiful antiquity with a story can still be affordable.

"The Beth Shan Bust" is part of the Bonhams antiquities sale in London on May 1st. Lot 221, Estimate £60,000-90,000 ($120,000-180,000).

(*Fiammetta Rocco writes the Art.view column on economist.com, and is the author of "The Miraculous Fever-tree".)