Tauroctony from the Gran Mitreo de Mérida

TNMM 584

For a long time nobody had paid attention to the important words of Mélida at the end of his description of the sculptures found in 1902 in the Cerro de San Albín: ’With these sculptures, various fragments of others were found, among them, two of the clothes of a colossal statue and the base with the feet of a small figure, and next to the feet, the start of an altar’.

In his Catálogo monumental he mentions under nº 1097 a piece of a floating mantle with traces of red paint, as well as a fragment of a dressed image with two ears of corn, an attribute of Ceres (no. 1098). In the 2006 and 2007 volumes of the journal Anas, Ana Mª Rodríguez Azcárraga published an important work, with the analysis of all the sculptural fragments corresponding to the information provided by Mélida and forgotten in the MNARM storage rooms, in which she proposed a very plausible restitution of the relief of the tauroctony of the great mithraeum of Mérida.

Based on this restitution, during the months of July and August 2010, the MNARM organised the exhibition ’Growing. Novelties in the Collections’, which included a drawing by José Manuel Jerez Linde with the ideal image of this tauroctomy, with the inclusion of the preserved fragments, as can be seen in the attached photo. The fragments are catalogued under a unique number, as they belong to the same relief, followed by the number of the specific piece being described.