Among the image-printed loom weights from northern Italy we can identify a very small category featuring images drawn with a 'naturalistic' intention, and not as a result of 'combining' of recurrent geometrical symbols (which we usually call 'fishbone/ear', 'X', 'wheel/flower', even if their real meaning is unknown). The ânaturalisticâ images here taken into account seem to recall something involved with popular devotion. The first one (pc.1), appears to represent a sort of 'temple', as another one (pc.2), very similar to the former, found on a loom weight from the same area, does; a temple whose tympanum in both cases contains an unclear symbol (respectively, a circular draw and a 'X'), and whose walls enclose a big vanished figure, in the first case, or a bewildering rhombus-shaped drawing, in the second case; the contact point of both printed reliefs is the small figure at the bottom of the square, which has to be interpreted as a phallic figure as it seems.
The second image we examined (pc.3) clearly represents a man, with no other characterizations than his strange pose, which means that heâs decidedly directing himself towards his right side. The hypothesis by D. Rigato of identifying him as Hercules, seems to be sustained on the one hand by the nudity of the body and because of the popularity of the Hercules cult in the area where the loom weight was found; on the other hand, the image doesnât show any other element, or any typical action which the Hero was known by in the antiquity.
The characterization of the examined 'naturalistic' printed-images lets us think about an extremely popular version of sacred or devotional, also 'apotropaic', subjects. The comparison with the large number of other printed-images on Cisalpine loom weights, whose abstract-geometrical compound drawings appear often to be followed by letters, or entire words (personal names and surnames), seems to warn about what could have been the real function of printed images: therefore, also images of sacred origin could have been used to mark - as a âsignatureâ of a single man, but also of a group of people, who recognizes himself in that subject - a certain category of production, was it clay or textile
