Published Catalogue Text: Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern Bronzes at the Harvard Art Museums
With its head extended horizontally away from its body, this solid-cast coiled snake may have served as a decorative attachment for some larger object, perhaps the handle of a large bronze vase. Its eyes are round, raised protrusions on the outside of its head. The underside of the head is flat. Its coiled body appears to be smooth, with no surface modeling or incision. The shallow volute formed by the coiled body brings to mind other coiled plant and mulluscan forms that occur at the bases of cast attachments for Greek bronze vessels from the Late Archaic through the Late Classical periods. On the rear of the attachment is a shallow rounded depression (1.86 cm in diameter).
While the original use of this snake remains unclear, a plausible suggestion is that it, and perhaps a symmetrical counterpart that coiled to the left instead of the right, were attached to the handles of a small bronze volute krater (1). The bodies of the huge gorgons that form the base plates for the handles of volute kraters such as the Vix Krater, sometimes divide into snake-headed legs (2). On later volute kraters, such as the Derveni Krater of the late fourth century BCE, snakes climb up the vertical edges of the volute handles, with their heads modeled fully in the round (3). The modeling of this snake suggests a date somewhere in the second half of the sixth century BCE. Closer attribution to a workshop within the greater Greek world is not currently possible.
NOTES:
1. W. Gauer, Die Bronzegefässe von Olympia: Mit Ausnahme der geometrischen Dreifüsse und der Kessel des orientalisierenden Stils, Olympische Forschungen 20 (Berlin, 1991) 153-54, 240, and 253; nos. M15-16 and P28; fig. 1, esp. 15-17 and 22; pls. 76.2 and 76.4. See also C. M. Stibbe, The Sons of Hephaistos: Aspects of the Archaic Greek Bronze Industry (Rome, 2000) 147-49.
2. For the Vix Krater, see id., Trebenishte: The Fortunes of an Unusual Excavation (Rome, 2003) 33, 77-78, and 85-86, figs. 36-37 and 48-49; and C. Rolley, ed., La tombe princière de Vix 1 (Paris, 2003) 97-98, 101, 102 n. 83, and 103; figs. 54-55, 58, and 61; pls. 77, 80-81, and 96-99.
3. For the Derveni Krater, see P. Themelis and I. Touratsoglou, Οι τάφοι του Δερβενίου = Hoi taphoi tou Derveniou (Athens, 1997) 70-72, no. B1, pls. 13-17 (esp. pl. 17) and 73-75 [in Greek]; and E. Gioure, Ο κρατήρας του Δερβενίου = Ho kratēras tou Derveniou (Athens, 1978) 3, fig. 1, pls. 1-2, 57-58, and 95 [in Greek].
David G. Mitten
