Published Catalogue Text: Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern Bronzes at the Harvard Art Museums
The bowl of this fragmentary spoon was probably originally oblong. The handle, which is rectangular in section, is surmounted by a togate figure, possibly holding a bowl in the right hand and staff in the left. The right leg appears to be bent and in stride beneath the garment. The figure may have a cloak wrapped around the neck and be wearing some kind of headdress (1).
It is difficult to date this type of spoon closely, and it could have been manufactured in the Roman period or much later (2).
NOTES:
1. A spoon in the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, inv. no. 48-2-188, also has a figural representation as a finial; see P. G. Warden, The Hilprecht Collection of Greek, Italic, and Roman Bronzes in the University of Pennsylvania Museum (Philadelphia, 1997) 71, no. A31. See also a fork with a figural finial in G. Zampieri and B. Lavarone, eds., Bronzi antichi del Museo Archaeologico di Padova, exh. cat., Museo Archeologico Padova (Rome, 2000) 205, no. 408.c.
2. The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology example (supra 1) is dated to the fifteenth to sixteenth centuries CE, and its provenience is given as Orvieto. Compare the range of Roman spoons in M. Garsson, ed., Une histoire d’alliage: Les bronzes antiques des réserves du Musée d’Archéologie Méditerranéenne, exh. cat. (Marseille, 2004) 42, nos. 60-65. Other instruments from antiquity also have figural finials; compare a salve pestle from Ephesos with an Asklepios finial in E. Künzl, Medizinische Instrumente aus Sepulkralfunden der römische Kaiserzeit (Bonn, 1983) 49, fig. 17.1; and the original version of the stylus represented by Harvard’s replica 1965.86.
David Smart
