Il perduto ritratto in tarsia di Ulpia Sirica dalla catacomba di S. Agnese sulla Via Nomentana. Un’ipotesi di ricostruzione dai documenti d’archivio

During the excavations conducted in 1876 in the arenario of the catacomb of St. Agnes on the Via Nomentana, an intact loculus belonging to a deceased named Ulpia Sirica was brought to light, closed by a marble inscription adorned with an inlaid portrait of the woman. The ornament was created with glass paste, marble, enamel, and painted bone and ivory listels. The tomb is currently buried by a landslide and it is therefore impossible to subject the ornament to further investigation. The previous photographic documentation available does not provide any clarification regarding the composition of the portrait, as unknown hands had long ago torn the decoration from the support, which at the time of the shots was hidden under protective glass. Nonetheless, the photographs allow some considerations to be made about the execution technique of the artefact, which was created by inserting the laths into a hollow made inside the marble slab and fixing them to it with a layer of bedding mortar. A few copies of the decoration, preserved in the excavation diary of canon Ubaldo Giordani in the Archives of the Canonica di S. Agnese and an older manuscript by Seroux d’Agincourt in the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, allow us, together with the published descriptions and handwritten notes of scholars from previous centuries, to guess at some of the constituent materials of the inlay and provide a hypothesis for the reconstruction of the lost portrait.