Un nouveau relief de Mithra tauroctone

Abstract

A relief entered as hitherto unpublished, appearing on the art market in 2000, shows the god Mithra tauroctone. Starting from an iconographic norm born of the reduplication of particular themes, variants exist in the representation of the ritual sacrifice. The New York relief reproduces the most current composition but one must ponder the absence of Cautès and Sol. The question at issue is to determine whether the relief was severed from a wider ensemble or whether it is a local adaptation to the norm which may come from a provincial community remote from the major cultural centres or come from a workshop unfamiliar with the mithraic imagery, which was presumably the case with the IInd and IIIrd century provincial workshops. The construction is not by the way that of a Roman workshop.

Keywords

• Mithra
• tauroctony
• Phrygian cap
• dadophore
• bull
• zodiac