Sourcing Greek and Roman Marble Sculpture in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: Combining Analytical, Archaeological, and Artistic Data

The provenance of Greek and Roman sculptures is significant to Classical scholars because in addition to revealing where the raw material for a particular object or fragment was quarried, it sheds light on economic and artistic aspects of marble use in antiquity. Stable carbon and oxygen isotope analysis is the best single method for determining marble provenance, but the quarry source can be unequivocally identified only 25% of the time. When supplemented by petrography and cathodoluminescence, isotopic overlap is resolved, but these methods require the removal of a substantial solid sample - which is just not possible on most museum pieces. Rather, the minimally-destructive isotopic method (1 mg of unweathered marble is sufficient) is preferably combined with stylistic analysis, literary information, and archaeological data in order to narrow the choices among overlapping isotope data fields.

We report here on the isotopic analysis of 150 Greek and Roman marble sculptures in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, including, for example, such well-known pieces as the Boston Three-Sided Relief. Our results demonstrate the utility of these complementary methods, and highlight the effectiveness of integrated, interdisciplinary research efforts. In many instances, initial identifications made by informed visual inspection were confirmed by the laboratory analyses; in others, the new identifications have considerable archaeological and art historical significance. In addition to illuminating the history of individual works of art, our results paint a more detailed picture of marble-working at different times in antiquity.