Juno Sospita adorns a roof

This horseshoe-shaped antefix consists of a narrow band at the base surmounted by a female head modelled in high relief. The arching crest of the woman’s helmet forms the top half of the background. Two teardrop shapes have been cut out below the helmet crest, alongside the locks of hair emerging from under the helmet. Covering the helmet is the scalp of a goat with ridged, curved horns and pointed ears. The painted embellishment is superbly preserved, with black and red designs layered atop a yellowish-white slip. A meander pattern in the form of a battlement is painted across the bottom band, its white background edged by black rectangles below and red ones above. Around the goddess’ neck is a thin red band; the pendants strung along it are rendered simply as short brushstrokes in red and black. The lips are painted red, while the eyes, eyebrows, and hair are black. The helmet, goat’s ears, and horns are grey, but the interior of the goat’s ears and the rhombus ornament on the front of the helmet are red. On the front of the helmet, over the red rhombus, two wide yellow stripes meet in a peak. The anchor for the helmet crest, a narrow strip set behind the horns and ears, bears a battlement pattern like that on the bottom band. Atop it a serrated row of black triangles indicates the base of the crest. The curving edge of the crest is contoured in red, and its interior is decorated in alternating red, black, and white stripes. The Berlin antefix belongs to a type that was popular in Latium and often used by the Faliscans. Copies of the type, variously painted, have been found in Rome (from the Basilica Iulia and from the Palatine Hill), Antemnae, Fidenae, Satricum, Lavinium, Segni, Falerii, and the Etruscan city of Caere. Antefixes decorated with satyr masks likely would have alternated with this type featuring the head of a goddess, lining the eaves of terracotta temple roofs. Multiple series of figurative antefix have been ascribed to the late Archaic phase of construction in the temple precinct at Satricum. Stylistically these tiles look back to Attic art of the early fifth century BC. The Juno-Sospita antefix type belongs to just such a group – and was produced in a series of smaller-scale antefixes that closely resemble the Berlin piece. In the fourth and third centuries BC, the type resurfaced at the Temple of Diana in Norba. The helmet bedecked with a goat scalp is characteristic of Juno Sospes Mater Regina, a goddess worshipped in Lanuvium. Cicero mentions the deity, and coins from the Roman Republican and Antonine periods indicate that her cult retained its significance well into the Imperial period. A colossal second-century AD marble sculpture in the Vatican Museums attests the same: it depicts the goddess with a shield and spear, and a goat skin pulled over her head and belted at her waist. Terracotta roofs decorated with colourful figurative elements were a special feature of Etruscan and Latian religious buildings (which, notwithstanding the roofs, were primarily built in transient materials like wood and mud brick). In these cultures, the roof system based on fired clay tiles was adopted from Greece quite early and developed into a wide variety of forms. Antefixes adorned with heads and masks entered Italian collections of antiquities at an early date, whence they passed into the art market and onward to numerous European collections. Just so, the Juno-Sospita antefix in Berlin was one of the first ancient objects to enter the collection of the Prussian king.