A ROMAN BRONZE PENDANT OF AN EAGLE, IMPERIAL PERIOD CIRCA 1ST CENTURY A.D

拍品描述

A ROMAN BRONZE PENDANT OF AN EAGLE, IMPERIAL PERIOD, CIRCA 1ST CENTURY A.D. Cast in the round and worked with chased detail, the eagle stands frontally with head turned sharply to its right, the hooked beak closed and the eye rendered as a raised almond. The wings are outspread and lifted, the primaries drawn out into long tapering pinions and the coverts articulated in overlapping rows of lobate feathers. The breast is covered in finer scale-like plumage descending to the belly, and the tail projects as a short blunt fan to the right. The bird perches with taloned feet upon a rocky or globular support, its curved lower contour suggesting an orb or a mound of ground. The surface retains a dark brown patina with scattered malachite-green encrustation in the recesses. The iconography is that of the Jovian eagle, the aquila of Jupiter Optimus Maximus and the standard-bird of the Roman legions. In imperial art the eagle carried a double register of meaning: as the attribute of Jupiter it signalled sovereignty and divine sanction, and as the emblem of the legions it carried the political weight of Roman military authority. The bird perched upon a globe or orb, when the support is read as such, becomes a still more specific image, the eagle mastering the sphere of the world, an image circulated on imperial coinage and funerary reliefs to figure the apotheosis of the emperor, whose soul was believed to be borne aloft by the eagle from the funeral pyre. Small bronze eagles of this scale were produced across the western and central provinces in considerable numbers during the first and second centuries A.D. They served variously as figural appliqués for military standards, sceptre finials, furniture mounts, votive dedications, and personal ornaments. The compact size and the frontal, heraldic pose of the present example, together with the pronounced projection of the wings, are consistent with use as a pendant or applied ornament rather than a free-standing figurine. Bronze, cast by the lost-wax method and finished with cold-worked chasing, was the standard medium for such domestic and devotional imagery, its accessibility allowing the iconography of imperial power to circulate at every social level from the legionary camp to the household shrine. This pendant exemplifies the diffusion of Jovian and imperial iconography through the small bronzes of the early Empire, in which the formal vocabulary of state art, the eagle, the orb, the outspread wings, was reduced to a portable scale and made available to private ownership. The compressed frontal composition and the confident cutting of the feathering place it within the mainstream provincial production of the first century. Dimensions: Height 4.8 cm

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