Tauroctony from Vermaseren's private collection

TNMM 376

This sculpted relief in a luxurious marble, rosso antico, belonged to the private collection of the Dutch scholar Maarten Jozef Vermaseren, author of the celebrated corpus of the Mithraic monuments of the Roman world that appeared in two volumes in 1956 and 1960 (CIMRM). He acquired this small object in 1961 from an antiquities dealer who informed him that it was originally from Rome or its surroundings. This is confirmed by the iconography and style of the relief, similar to those of four Mithraic sculptures originating there. Stylistically, these five objects can be dated to the years 160-170 C.E.

Although none of the roughly 700 representations of the tauroctony known to date are exactly the same, this small relief, which reduces the scene to just the essentials, presents a certain number of distinctive features. Mithras, his feet bare, kneels on the back of the bull, which he is staring, and pulls back the animal's head with his left hand, placed under its snout rather than on its nostrils. A dog and a serpent are positioned towards the bloody wound, while a scorpion grabs the bull's testicles. The scene is set in a cave. In the upper-left corner, Sol stands, non-radiant and nude except for a cape fluttering in the wind, while holding the reins of his quadriga with his left hand. Opposite this Luna, draped in a garment, with her head turned towards the tauroctony, holds the reins of her biga, drawn by horses rather than the traditional bovines.

Four other representations of the tauroctony have much in common with this one: a relief today at the Cincinnati Art Museum and three statuary groups in the round, two preserved in Rome and one in Santa Barbara, California. On each of the five, Mithras faces the head of the bull while seizing its snout; the raven is missing; the god is barefoot; the scorpion has a long tail; the tail of the bull does not end in an ear of wheat; and the blade of the dagger is rather long. Moreover, there are stylistic similarities among these sculptured objects, the most striking of which are the head of the bull and the folds of Mithras's tunic. These similarities are such that one can assume a common prototype — freestanding? — for these five representations. This series of tauroctonic scenes illustrates at the same time the artisans' creative liberty and the permanence of a certain number of essential visual elements.