Published Catalogue Text: Stone Sculptures: The Greek, Roman and Etruscan Collections of the Harvard University Art Museums , written 1990
79
Fragment of a Lion
The lion's back end and the area on which the animal crouches are broken irregularly. The mouth is bored through to make the two large front teeth or fangs. Mane and anatomy are summarily treated, including the pinhole-like eyes.
The lion is crouching on a flat surface, which seems to be finished in a slightly curving fillet, probably indicating the edge of a lid. This would place the lion on the right front or left rear corner of a gabled "Greek" sarcophagus or large urn. There is a further section of flat, finished surface at the animal's left side.
On an early Roman imperial cinerary urn in Malibu, four small lions (similar to this fragment) crouch facing outward to the long sides at the corners of a very elaborate, temple-form roof with a ridge-pole and imitation covering tiles all in marble. The ends of the body have Hellenistic funerary portals in the tradition of tombs from Asia Minor and Macedonia (Vermeule, C., Neuerburg, 1973, pp. 38-39, no. 86). Other elements are taken from Campanian painting or mosaics (birds drinking from kraters) and Pergamene buildings (capitals and pilasters), all suggesting that the little lions came from a mixture of decorative details remembered as far back as the Alexander sarcophagus from Sidon. Indeed in this vein, back around 400 B.C. four such lions crouch on special little plinths and face outward, again near the corners of the long sides, on the lid of the so-called Lycian sarcophagus from this same Phoenician royal necropolis (Hamdi Bey, Reinach, 1892, pl. 14; Reinach, 1909-1912, 1, p. 409, and accessible full view of the side and lid with the two lions). These little corner lions thus became signatures of royal luxury and tradition in the age before Alexander the Great and Alexander's times to the late Hellenistic and Graeco-Roman worlds.
Cornelius Vermeule and Amy Brauer
