In 2015, during a Congress in Aalen (Germany), the director of, Manuel Occina Doménech, showed during his presentation an image of the bronze sculpture found in Pamplona in 1895 and the one that had lost the track eleven years later. The miracle then happened. Among the public was an American researcher who identified this piece: he was in the hands of a private collector in New York. How he got there and the avatars he suffered during the more than one hundred years that was missing is still a mystery.
In 2023 ,. Then, it was believed that this 127 centimeters bronze sculpture – dated in the second century DC – represented a male figure dressed in toga (lacking bust, a custom of the time, is unknown to whom it could belong).
Now, the report commissioned by experts Carmen Marks-Jacob and Hans Ruprecht Goette, has surprised own and strangers: the statue does not represent a man, but a girl of about 10 or 12 years who wears the Roman citizen toga and who has a beam of spikes in her right hand as a symbol of her future fertility. According to Marcks-Jacobs, it could have a funeral meaning or have been part of a family sculptural group. They also believe that the sculpture dates from the 1st century and that it is, therefore, an older century than initially estimated.
Today, this statue is the only representation of this genre in bronze. A feature that makes this piece even more unique, one of the only two statues thogaded in bronze of found in the Iberian Peninsula. The other is, which is preserved in it, and that was found in the eighties of the twentieth century. In fact, in all of it, only 13 bronze togados of that type have been found.
Since his arrival in Pamplona, on May 12, 2022, sculpture has been the subject of scientific studies, both technical and historical and artistic. Last October, the first session of the, specialized meeting of an international nature, organized by the University of Navarra, was held at the Museum of Navarra.
The objective was to present the Pompous to the highest specialists in Roman statutee so that they could contribute their knowledge. Among the participants was Hans Rupprecht Goette, recognized as a world authority in statutee of the, very particularly of the Togados. It was he who transferred to those responsible for the museum that the Togado was most likely, a togada, and recommended that they contact the specialist, author in 2005 of an article that included a different interpretation of this piece.
The Navarra Museum commissioned both German experts a specialized study – which is still ongoing, but from which this previous report has been published – that concludes that the person represented in the statue is a woman and who advances its construction in a century. The piece will be exposed again throughout this 2025 at the Navarra Museum, which currently has several rooms closed by works.
