Nisa
Clay sculptures
The production of clay statues in Nisa is comparable to that of other sites in central Asia and anticipates some of the important developments of Kushan and Greco-Buddhist sculpture. This type of decoration was also contemplated for other buildings in Nisa; first and foremost, the building containing the Round Hall.
The first fragments of painted clay statues were found in the Round Hall since the trenches performed by Marušcenko and Eršov (1934-1936), but they were left at the bottom of the opened trenches even when in 1949 the JuTAKE (Complex Archaeological Expedition in Southern Turkmenistan) excavations began; their recovery began only in 1990, when the team of restorers from the Italian Archaeological Expedition began cleaning them and systematically removing the soil. Sofar, approximately 100 fragments have been recovered from the Round Hall and around 10 from the Red Building; they are now stored in the storerooms of the National Archaeological Museum in Ashgabat.
The recovered fragments belong to statues depicting figures wearing draped or military clothing; in most cases they consist of portions of clothing and hairstyles, and of body parts (heads, hands, arms) in fewer cases. Among the latter, the exceptional fragment of a bearded male head that has been identified, through comparisons with coins, with Mithridates I especially stands out. Fragments of clothing ad hairstyles are also especially interesting, because they give us an idea of the artistic trends that must have influenced Nisa’s sculptors when they prepared their works. In fact, the iconographic and stylistic study of the fragments allows the sculptures of the Round Hall to be considered as an exceptional example of Hellenistic art in central Asia.
Thanks to the studies conducted so far, it is possible to advance some interesting hypotheses on the sculptures of the Round Hall. They probably consisted of numerous male and female statues, which were at least five; at least three were clothed with tunics and mantles, one wore Iranian dress and one was probably a warrior. They had Greek harstyles, with their shoulder-length hair in curls or plaited and, in the male statues, with beards with long wavy wisps or with short curls under the chin. It cannot be determined for sure where these statues, which were greater than life-sized (2.30-2.40 m), were positioned inside the room. Given the assumption of a helliptic dome, they were probably not on the walls, but were probably placed on the floor, possibly on wooden bases. It is also impossible to determine if they were grouped together or placed apart from each other, maybe at regular intervals.
Technique
One of the most interesting features of the clay statues is their “composite” technique of execution: the various parts (heads, arms, hands, clothing and hairstyles, for example) were modelled separately (some were cast and some were modelled by hand) and then joined to each other. In order to hold such statues together, an internal framework, also of different materials and shapes (wood, metal and plaster), on which the layers of clay were applied one at a time. A vivid polychromy characterized the statues’ final appearance: in fact, abundant traces of blue, red and pink remain on the fragments of clothing, while black and red are prevalent on hair. To this regard, interesting discoveries have been made thanks to several chemical analyses that were performed in the laboratories of the Valle d’Aosta’s Regional Board of the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities, which shed light on the composition of the various types of clay and colour pigments used in the final stage of pictorial finishing. During the 2005 excavation campaign, measurements were also made directly on the samples stored in the National Museum of Ashgabat with two spectrophotometers provided by the “Nello Carrara” Institute in Florence.