6th]5th century B.C.
Bronze
H. 7.8 cm, L. 8.7 cm, Depth 4.1 cm
This small bronze figure shows a three headed, snake-tailed dog. In
Greek mythology, such a beast is known as Cerberus, the guardian of the underworld. According to Hesiod, Cerberus's mother was the half woman-half snake known as Echidona, and his father was Typhon, the giant with 100 snake heads. Cerberus is said to have had 50 heads, but he is generally depicted with only three heads. It is very rare to find Cerberus depicted in sculptural form, but there is one example known in the Warren Collection at Bowdoin College. The image began to appear frequently as pottery decoration, particularly on the black-figure pottery that flourished around the 6th century BC. Hercules's 12th labor was to bring this Cerberus from the underworld to the world of the living, without using any weapons, and Cerberus is shown in these scenes, and is also depicted as a subject by himself.
This small figure shows the superb sense of balance and realistic expressive power found in Greek art of this period, particularly in its ability to create an image of a three headed dog with a snake-headed tail without any sense of disharmony or misfit. The incised lines which circle the neck and the incised lines on the rump are musculature expression, and they can also be seen on a small bronze figure of a bull in the Ortiz collection, thought to be an Italian work from the 6th century BC, but they are not commonly found on bronze animals. This type of expression can also be found on the Cerberus depicted in a red-figure Amphora of the 6th century BC in the Louvre, and also in the expression of the immortal ox that Hercules brings to the human world seen in the black-figure amphora of the same period now in the Biblioteque Nationale in Paris. Basically this expressive style was seen frequently from the classical period onwards, and rather than giving a sense of an animal we can relate to, wasn't this realism intended to give a sense of a somehow majestic mythical form? The emotions elegantly expressed in this unusually formed imaginary beast were gradually grasped in stages in the movements of beasts seen on the signet rings from the Minoan period onwards, and it is possible that there was a traditional connection between this type of expression and the iconography of multi-headed beasts.
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