A GREEK GRANITE POMEGRANATE JAR CIRCA 5TH CENTURY B.C.

拍品描述

A GREEK GRANITE POMEGRANATE JAR, CIRCA 5TH CENTURY B.C. Of globular form, carved in the shape of a ripe pomegranate, the body swelling from a rounded base to a shouldered upper section, surmounted by a separately carved lid rendered as the calyx of the fruit with pointed, upright sepals radiating around a central recess. Two small pierced lug handles project from the shoulders, allowing the jar to be suspended or secured with a cord. The stone is a mottled reddish-purple veined with ochre and cream inclusions, worked to a smooth polish across the exterior that follows the natural swell of the fruit. The choice of the pomegranate as a vessel form is deliberate and carries specific weight in the Greek visual vocabulary. The fruit was associated with fertility, marriage, and the underworld, its many seeds standing for abundance and generation, its consumption by Persephone binding her to Hades and to the cyclical return of the seasons. Pomegranates appear as votive offerings in sanctuaries of Hera, Demeter, and Persephone, and as attributes held by seated goddesses on Archaic and Classical votive reliefs. A stone jar shaped as the fruit itself, closed by a lid formed as its crown, condenses this symbolism into a single object intended to hold something of value, most plausibly an unguent, aromatic oil, or a small quantity of precious material appropriate to funerary or votive deposition. The material itself distinguishes this piece from the more common terracotta and faience pomegranate vessels produced across the eastern Mediterranean. Hard stone of this kind resisted the lathe and required patient abrasive working, and its use for a small closed vessel with a fitted lid signals a commission of some standing rather than an ordinary domestic object. The banded, iron-rich stone was prized for its resemblance to ripe fruit and to flesh, and the natural veining across the body of this jar has been allowed to remain visible, working with the form rather than against it. The pierced lugs, small but functional, suggest that the jar was intended to be carried or hung, consistent with a portable container for a scented substance. The pomegranate-shaped vessel has a long life across the ancient Mediterranean and Near East, appearing in Egyptian, Cypriot, Phoenician, and Greek production from the Late Bronze Age onward. Greek examples in stone are considerably rarer than their ceramic and glass counterparts, and the survival of both body and lid in matched condition is uncommon. This jar exemplifies the Greek taste for translating naturalistic subjects into hard stone containers of ritual or funerary purpose, in which the form of the vessel is inseparable from the meaning of what it holds. Its interest lies in the union of a symbolically loaded subject, the pomegranate, with a material choice that raises the object from the level of ordinary offering to that of considered commission. Dimensions: Height 11 cm

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