Muse with head of Juno .. [1 / 2]
Statue of Juno at Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA.
Roman, early Imperial period, late 1st century BCE Marble (Carrara, Italy, for body; Mt. Pentelikon, Greece, for head) The head, identified as Juno by her diadem and features, is made of a different kind of marble than the body, clearly indicating that they do not belong together. The original statue was carved from a single piece of marble. Juno, wife of Jupiter and queen of the gods (Hera to the Greeks), was worshipped as the goddess of marriage and childbirth, and protector of the Roman state. The colossal body, the largest Roman statue in the United States, matches in style, technique, and type of marble five other statues now in several European collections. They most likely belonged to a group representing Apollo and the Nine Muses, commissioned by the future emperor Augustus for his remodeling of the Theater of Pompey in 32 BCE. At some point, the original head was lost and replaced with another ancient one, probably in the 17th century when the statue entered the collection of Cardinal Ludovisi in Rome. There this statue stood in the famed Esquiline gardens until it was sold to Mrs. Mary Pratt Brandegee, who installed it around 1904 in the Italianate garden designed for her estate (still intact) in nearby Brookline, Massachusetts.













