Sculpture

Greek

A Greek bronze appliqué of a horse and rider, late Archaic to early Classical Period, circa 490 BC

Bronze

Height: 7.4 cm

The rider is a nude young man depicted in profile, his head carved in the round with slightly archaised features. He is seated astride the horse in the foreground, clasping...

The rider is a nude young man depicted in profile, his head carved in the round with slightly archaised features. He is seated astride the horse in the foreground, clasping the reins in his hands, leading another horse in the background, its head and body slightly visible behind.

Provenance

Beaven Collection, Cotswolds, UK, 1960s

Fortnum and Mason, Equus. Three Millennia of the Horse, London, 14 April - 29 June 2003

With Charles Ede Limited, London

With Cahn AG, Basel, 2010

Swiss private collection, Zurich

Literature

Such an appliqué would once have been riveted to a large-scale bronze vessel such as a krater. This is an unusual type with one rider but two horses.

The combination of the naturalistic representation of the horses' bodies with the more stylised facial features on the young man, indicates that this bronze may be dated to the transitional period from Archaic to Classical Greece; between the first and second Persian Wars circa 490 – 480 BC, this was a time of great artistic, cultural and political change in Greece.

For a bronze figure with similar archaic rendering of the rider's face and eyes, cf. M. Comstock & C. Vermeule, Greek, Etruscan and Roman Bronzes in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Boston, 1971, p. 42, no. 42. For other slightly earlier Greek statuettes of riders, cf. Comstock & Vermeule op. cit., pp. 34-5, nos. 32-33 and cf. A.S. Walker, Animals in Ancient Art from the Leo Mildenberg Collection, Mainz, 1996, no. 124, 188; a Laconian example is now in the Getty: C.C. Mattusch, Enduring Bronze: Ancient Art, Modern Views, Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2014, p. 76, fig. 55.

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