Published Catalogue Text: Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern Bronzes at the Harvard Art Museums
This small sphinx is solid cast, but its front and hind legs, wings, and tail are very skillfully rendered. The wiry dog-like body of the sphinx crouches on its hind legs, the feet of which touch the paws of the vertically placed front legs. A piece at the bottom of the S-shaped tail is missing. The wings curve backward. The right wing ends in a point. A piece of the left wing appears to have been repaired, but the tip of this wing is missing. The upper part of the body and the wings are heavily corroded. No surface ornamentation is visible. The sphinx’s head turns slightly outward to her left. Her alert face features wide, oval incised eyes, a straight nose, and a prominent chin. Her face is surmounted by a rounded roll of hair that projects upward from in front of her two ears. A ridge around the crown of the head suggests that the hair was bound by a fillet. There are traces of horizontal grooving on the mass of hair that descends along the back of the head toward the neck.
Sphinxes, male and female, have long been prominent members of the cast of imaginary composite creatures that populated the ancient Mediterranean imagination. The Egyptian sphinx, with a lion’s body and a male head, is the projection of the fierce fighting power of the pharaoh. This type of sphinx appears to be the inspiration for the small recumbent sphinx in the Harvard collection, 1949.11. The Hellenic sphinx, however, is always female, with a human head and a body that varies between feline and canine characteristics and usually has wings, such as 1950.137 (1). This type is first seen in ivories, wall paintings, and engraved gems of the Aegean mainland in the Late Bronze Age. It then migrates to the Near East, returning to the Greek repertoire during the seventh century BCE and later as a motif in the Orientalizing period. Female sphinxes, dangerous and unpredictable, are especially prominent as guardians of graves (2). The best-known sphinx in Greek mythology is the Theban sphinx who killed any passersby unable to answer her riddle, which was finally solved by Oedipus.
The lean body of this little sphinx, along with the turn of her head, shows a masterful mixture of developed Early Classical anatomy in the body and wings and lingering Archaic qualities in her head and hair. Her pose, situated as if ready to fly up at any moment, strongly resembles that of the great Late Archaic Athenian marble sphinx, now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (3), which surmounted an elaborate grave stele dated to c. 530 BCE. Harvard’s sphinx, however, probably dates to c. 470 BCE, or even a little later. Small sphinxes like this were used to adorn the rims of larger bronze vessels and also served as the finials for elaborate bronze pins, such as the pair of miniatures in the MFA (4), and a tiny bronze sphinx in the Princeton Art Museum (5). This sphinx seems fully part of the well-established tradition of sphinxes as fearsome creatures who guarded the dead (6).
NOTES:
1. For Greek sphinxes and their Near Eastern antecedents, see J. M. Padgett, The Centaur’s Smile, exh. cat., Princeton University Art Museum (New Haven, 2003) 78-83 and 261-83; and A. Dessenne, Le Sphinx: Étude iconographique (Paris, 1957).
2. See E. Vermeule, Aspects of Death in Early Greek Art and Poetry (Berkeley, 1979).
3. For the Athenian marble sphinx, see M. Comstock and C. C. Vermeule, Sculpture in Stone: The Greek, Roman and Etruscan Collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Boston, 1976) 11, no. 17.
4. M. Comstock and C. C. Vermeule, Sculpture in Stone and Bronze: Additions to the Collections of Greek, Etruscan and Roman Art, 1971-1988, in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Boston, 1988) 77, no. 90
5. Princeton University Art Museum, inv. no. 57.59; see F. F. Jones, “Recent Acquisitions of Ancient Art,” Record of the Art Museum, Princeton University 17 (1958): 46-54, esp. 46-48, no. 2, fig. 1.
6. See G. M. A. Richter, “Archaic Attic Gravestones Epilegomena,” Revue Archéologique, 6. ser., 31/32 (1948): 863-71.
David G. Mitten
