Relief Fragments Depicting a Seated Woman and a Griffin (Early 1st century): Artwork and History

Relief Fragments Depicting a Seated Woman and a Griffin (Early 1st century) is in the Art Institute of Chicago collection. The museum lists its creator attribution as Roman.

The work and its context

The Art Institute of Chicago describes the work:

Inside some Roman houses, baths, and tombs, multiple layers of slow-drying stucco were applied to rough stone walls and divided into panels that were then painted. While the surface was still damp, fresh stucco was applied and modeled into decorative motifs and figures, which were left white to contrast with the painted background. This relief panel and its partner (1922.4429) likely came from the same building. In this panel, a seated woman extends her right arm toward a slender griffin, a mythological winged beast with the body of a cat and the head of a bird.

Object facts

• Title: Relief Fragments Depicting a Seated Woman and a Griffin
• Date: Early 1st century
• Artist attribution: Roman
• Place of origin: Italy
• Medium: Stucco, pigment, and gold
• Dimensions: 42.6 × 58.8 × 10.2 cm (16 3/4 × 23 1/8 × 4 in.)
• Type: Architectural fragment
• Department: Arts of Greece, Rome, and Byzantium
• Reference number: 1922.4428

Collection credit

Gift of Mrs. Edith Healy Hill

View the original

Explore the artwork in the Art Institute's collection, including its image and the museum's current catalogue details.

The description above is credited to the Art Institute of Chicago and reused under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0; HTML formatting has been converted to plain text. Other catalogue metadata and the public-domain image are provided under CC0 1.0.