Phalera constructions

[Renatus]

Brian,
I understand precisely what you are trying to convey. Give me credit for having some intelligence. What I am trying to put forward is an alternative that may have some merit. I will concede now that one of my comments does not assist my cause. I suggested that, if the maker of the facing had made his image too large, he could compensate by cutting down the backplate. This is obviously nonsense; it could only make the situation worse. Where such a remedy could apply would be if he had made his image too small. The only mitigation I can offer is that I prepared my post under some pressure and did not read it through carefully enough.

To get back to the issue, it seems to me that any craftsman worth his salt could work to a pre-prepared backplate and take the necessary measurements to make his image fit. If you say, however, that this is impossible and that the facings must be made first, I must bow to your expertise and look for another explanation for the evidence that we have before us. Of course, I am not suggesting that, having created his facing, the artist handed over the completion of the phalera to someone else. I would expect him to be responsible for the filling of the relief and the fitting of the backplate. What I fail to see is why another craftsman should not have the more mundane task of making the backplates, possibly working to the measurements and maybe templates provided by the artist. This may be a dangerous assumption but I would suspect that, in making your backplates, you make them slightly oversize and then file them down for an exact fit. If the facings have to be made first, I see no reason why the Roman workman making the backplates should not also make them oversize, with the artist cutting and filing them down to fit his facings.

I have to come back to what you call (rather rudely, I thought, but I'll let that pass) my "obsession" with the names being scratched on the inside face of the backplates. This cannot just be ignored; it must mean something. My explanation, as you know, is that there are two people involved in the making of the phalerae and that the maker of the backplates marked them so that the maker of the facings could relate them to the reliefs that he had created or was about to create. This is the only explanation that makes sense to me, although I am happy to consider alternatives. While it is theoretically possible that the maker of the facings also made the backplates and marked them with the owner's name because he was working on more than one set at a time and did not want to get them mixed up, I think that this is unlikely; he should be sufficiently familiar with his own work not to get in a muddle. What seems to me virtually impossible is that he marked them with his own name. There seems to be no point to it. Again, this may be a dangerous question to ask but do you mark your name on the inner faces of your backplates before fitting the reliefs? If you do, I would really like to know why you go to the trouble.