Left Hand Resting Against a Tambourine (?)

Left Hand Resting Against a Tambourine (?)

The hand is broken away at the wrist, and the edges of the round object have suffered.

This rather delicate female hand might come from a small statue of Cybele or a Muse or even a personified province such as Phrygia. The colossal figure of Parian marble in the Ince Blundell Hall collection at Liverpool stands with her left hand on a tambourine or tympanum and has been identified as Phrygia, Bithynia, or Cappadocia, one of a series of provinces from Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli (Toynbee, 1984, pp. 67-69, pl. XXIV, 4). This fragment could have come from a small statue of this type.

Cornelius Vermeule and Amy Brauer