COMMISSION #5 – MARTA ROBERTI

To welcome the winter solstice, Marta Roberti represented the goddess standing on the back of a deer, looking upward and holding in the palm of her h and a black bird, with a long feathered tail.

The original iconography of Juno Dolichena, from which the artist draws inspiration and which sees the deity clothed in a long tunic, scepter, and mirror, is abandoned in favor of a figure devoid of any cultural connotation or attribute of power, in total harmony with nature.
The naked body and loose hair make her resemble an Amazon, while the upward thrust, suggested by the momentum of her feet and arms, seems to liken her to a bird, ready to soar into the air. On the other hand, it also aligns her with the characteristic forms of votive figurines, endowed with surprising evocative power.
The posture and nudity archaize her form and content, eternalizing her and assimilating her not so much to a deity of the Roman pantheon, but rather more to a mother goddess, or perhaps a minoan potnia theròn , protector of a wild dimension represented by the same animals that accompany her.
The composition of the image, of an architectural nature, gives rise to a sort of overlap or communion between its components: the animal one, therefore, does not appear merely as a simple attribute of the human, but presents itself as its symbiont, an element that determines its very identity.
In this sense, Marta Roberti's Juno declares a total equivalence between the divine and animal nature of the goddess, a complete adherence to the sphere of the Wild, from which she originates and towards which she constantly tends.

Marta Roberti, Self-portrait as Juno Dolichena, 2022

Text by Giulia Gaibisso