A Collector’s Menagerie: Animal Sculpture from the Ancient World
A COLLECTOR’S MENAGERIE
ANIMAL SCULPTURE FROM THE ANCIENT WORLD
Ever since he first drew on the walls of his cave, man has had the desire to depict the creatures around him. The Sladmore Galle
News-Antique.com - Jul 17,2009 - A COLLECTOR’S MENAGERIE
ANIMAL SCULPTURE FROM THE ANCIENT WORLD
Ever since he first drew on the walls of his cave, man has had the desire to depict the creatures around him. The Sladmore Gallery, 57 Jermyn Street, St James’s, London, is renowned for exhibiting animal sculpture from the last 200 years, and has now invited Rupert Wace Ancient Art to introduce collectors to a veritable menagerie from the ancient world, spanning a period of some 2,400 years. A Collector’s Menagerie: Animal Sculpture from the Ancient World will be on view from Wednesday 12 to Friday 28 May 2010. Around 70 important and appealing pieces will be offered for prices ranging from £1,000 to over £150,000.
The earliest piece in the exhibition is a Hittite stone head of a goat, dating from the 3rd millennium BC. The most recent is a Byzantine bronze finial in the form of a dove dating from around the 5th century AD, possibly an early Christian piece representing Noah’s Dove, a symbol of resurrection.
Birds and animals played an important role in every aspect of ancient Egyptian culture. They believed that the world was inhabited by unseen powers and forces which could be made manifest by the behaviour and characteristics of living creatures. Thus, deities could take the form of animals though, even if a deity adopted a certain animal form, not all members of that particular species were sacred. Some animals were never associated with a deity but had a symbolic significance while others appear only as hieroglyphic signs in the written Egyptian language.
One of the best known Egyptian gods is Bastet represented by the cat and, indeed, the most prized piece in this exhibition is a handsome bronze mummy mask of a cat’s head, its large scale indicating that it would have belonged to a particularly important or venerated cat. Dating from the Late Dynastic Period, 25th-31st Dynasty, 715-332 BC, it was formerly in the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York, the bequest of Arthur B. Michael, 1941. The female cat came to be associated uniquely with Bastet, an ancient goddess worshipped at Per-Bastet (Bubastis) in the Delta. The seated cat, an example of which is also included in this show, represents the goddess on earth and would have been the focus of ritual and worship in the temple.
Other Egyptian animals and birds represented in the exhibition include bulls, baboons and crocodiles, falcons, vultures, ibis and owls, and these, like the cat, either represent gods or goddesses or are important protectors of the king. The materials used to represent them vary from gold and bronze to wood and terracotta.
The bull was revered for its belligerence, savagery and virility and from the earliest Dynasties was associated with the king as slaughterer of Egypt’s enemies. It was an animal form which was also associated with three major Egyptian deities, the most important being the Apis bull at Memphis, the double on earth of the creator god Ptah. Only one was alive at any
