Silenus Bust for a Couch (1–125 CE): Art, History and Details

Silenus Bust for a Couch (1–125 CE) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

This bust of Silenus was part of the fulcrum or armrest of an ancient Roman couch. Silenus was the tutor and companion of Bacchus, the Roman god of wine. He is shown with a long curly beard, bushy eyebrows, and wearing a garland of ivy vines with berries. His deerskin robe, tied by the animal’s hoof, falls off his shoulder, suggesting drunkenness. The bust would have been placed at the base of the armrest where it met the seat of the couch, while an animal head likely decorated the top. As is the case with many Roman objects, Romans adapted their couch style and decoration from the Greeks.

Object facts

• Title: Silenus Bust for a Couch
• Date: 1–125 CE
• Culture: Italy, Roman
• Type: Sculpture
• Technique: bronze
• Dimensions: Diameter: 7.8 cm (3 1/16 in.); Overall: 11 cm (4 5/16 in.)
• Collection: GR - Roman
• Department: Greek and Roman Art
• Accession number: 1974.88

A detail from the museum

This silenus’s beard is made up of exactly ten ringlets of curls.

Collection credit

Andrew R. and Martha Holden Jennings Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Lee, Sherman E. “The Year in Review for 1974.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 62, no. 3 (1975): 62–102.
• “Annual Report for 1974.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 62, no. 6 (1975): 175–209.
• Barr-Sharrar, Beryl. "Towards a Chronology of the Roman Imperial Decorative Bust" in Toreutik und figürliche Bronzen römischer Zeit: Akten der 6. Tagung über antike Bronzen, 13.-17. Mai 1980. Colloque international sur les bronzes antiques, G.-M. Faider-Feytmans, and Ulrich Gehrig, eds.Berlin: Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Antikenmuseum, 1984. pp. 41-49.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.