Published Catalogue Text: Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern Bronzes at the Harvard Art Museums
The forelegs of a small winged horse reach to the right. Its head turns forward and is modeled completely in the round. The tip of its nose is missing. Both forelegs are modeled as a single unit. The stump of the wing rises above the shoulder. There is a rounded cavity in the wing that may originally have contained an inlay of some substance contrasting with the surface of the bronze. The underside of this fragment is flat and slightly curved, conforming to the curvature of the larger object to which it was attached.
This winsome fragment originally belonged to a class of handles characterized by small horses or the protomes of horses, winged or wingless, on either side of a wide flat central handle, textured by concave cavetto flutes. Therefore, this fragment certainly had a counterpart at the other end of the handle to which it belonged. There are examples in Palermo (1), as well as on a plate with two similar handles attached now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2). The intact New York example demonstrates that such handles were attached to a flat pan or plate, rather than to a deeper dish or basin.
Although a winged horse is usually identified as Pegasos, the offspring of the beheaded Gorgon Medusa, winged horses also sometimes draw the chariots of the gods, as can be seen on a large painted “Melian” amphora of c. 650-620 BCE, in the National Archaeological Museum, Athens, where winged horses pull Apollo’s chariot (3). While this handle may have been made in Corinth, other workshops on mainland Greece and the Greek west remain viable candidates for its place of manufacture. It probably dates between 530 and 500 BCE.
NOTES:
1. See C. A. Di Stefano, Bronzetti figurati del Museo nazionale di Palermo (Rome, 1975) 97-98, nos. 175-76, pl. 38.
2. Metropolitan Museum of Art, inv. no. 1986.322.2. I thank M. Baron from the Greek and Roman Department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art for the following references: J. Frel, “Some Observations on Classical Bronzes,” J. Paul Getty Museum Journal 11 (1983) 117-21, esp. 119-21; C. Rolley, Greek Bronzes (London, 1986) 141, fig. 22; and E. J. Milleker, “Greek and Roman. Ancient Art: Gifts from the Norbert Schimmel Collection,” Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 49.4 (1992) 37-52 and 60-62, esp. 39-40.
3. Athens National Archaeological Museum, inv. no. 3961; see J. Boardman, Early Greek Vase Painting (London, 1998) 128, fig. 250.I, 2. See also Athens National Archaeological Museum, inv. no. 354, in ibid., 130, fig. 252.I, 2.
David G. Mitten
