Bronze Monsters and the Cultures of Wonder: Griffin Cauldrons in the Preclassical Mediterranean

By Nassos Papalexandrou

The eighth and seventh centuries BCE were a time of flourishing exchange between the Mediterranean and the Near East. One of the period’s key imports to the Hellenic and Italic worlds was the image of the griffin, a mythical monster that usually possesses the body of a lion and the head of an eagle. In particular, bronze cauldrons bore griffin protomes—figurative attachments showing the neck and head of the beast. Crafted in fine detail, the protomes were made to appear full of vigor, transfixing viewers.

Bronze Monsters and the Cultures of Wonder takes griffin cauldrons as case studies in the shifting material and visual universes of preclassical antiquity, arguing that they were perceived as lifelike monsters that introduced the illusion of verisimilitude to Mediterranean arts. The objects were placed in the tombs of the wealthy (Italy, Cyprus) and in sanctuaries (Greece), creating fantastical environments akin to later cabinets of curiosities. Yet griffin cauldrons were accessible only to elites, ensuring that the new experience of visuality they fostered was itself a symbol of status. Focusing on the sensory encounter of this new visuality, Nassos Papalexandrou shows how spaces made wondrous fostered novel subjectivities and social distinctions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Release date: Nov 23, 2021
• ISBN: 9781477323632

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Bronze Monsters and the Cultures of Wonder

GRIFFIN CAULDRONS IN THE PRECLASSICAL MEDITERRANEAN

NASSOS PAPALEXANDROU

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS

AUSTIN

Publication of this book was made possible in part by funds from the Center for the Study of Ancient Italy (CSAI), Department of Art and Art History, College of Fine Arts, The University of Texas at Austin.

Copyright © 2021

by the University of Texas Press

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First edition, 2021

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Papalexandrou, Athanasios Christou, 1965– author.

Title: Bronze monsters and the cultures of wonder : griffin cauldrons in the preclassical Mediterranean / Nassos Papalexandrou.

Description: First edition. | Austin : University of Texas Press, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021007056

ISBN 978-1-4773-2361-8 (cloth)

ISBN 978-1-4773-2362-5 (library ebook)

ISBN 978-1-4773-2363-2 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Kettles—Mediterranean Region. | Griffins in art. | Pots—Mediterranean Region. | Bronze bowls—Mediterranean Region. | Art, Ancient—Mediterranean Region—Oriental influences. | Material culture—Mediterranean Region. | Mediterranean Region—Antiquities.

Classification: LCC DE61.i48 P36 2022 | DDC 937/.01—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021007056

doi:10.7560/323618

For Amy and Christina

I regard wonder as the first of all passions.

—DESCARTES

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PREFACE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION

PART I. GRIFFIN CAULDRONS IN CONTEXTS OF LIFE AND DEATH

CHAPTER ONE: The Eastern Mediterranean, Ionia, and the Aegean

CHAPTER TWO: Mainland Greece

CHAPTER THREE: Italy and France

PART II. SOURCES FOR THE LIVES OF GRIFFIN CAULDRONS

CHAPTER FOUR: Kolaios’s Monster Cauldron at the Heraion of Samos (Herodotus 4.152)

CHAPTER FIVE: Monsters in Images: Pictorial Representations of Griffin Cauldrons

PART III. RESPONSES TO THE UNCANNY

CHAPTER SIX: Vision of Wonders

CONCLUSION

NOTES

REFERENCES

INDEX

ILLUSTRATIONS

FIG. 0.1. Distribution map of griffin cauldrons around the Mediterranean.

FIG. 0.2. Delphi, Sanctuary of Apollo: Hammered-bronze griffin protome. Inv. DM 30933.

FIG. 1.1. Spatiotemporal graph.

FIG. 1.2. Cyprus, Salamis, Royal Cemetery, T 79: Cauldron. Inv. CM 202.

FIG. 1.3. Rhodes, Kameiros: Bronze griffin protome. Rhodes AM 14714.

FIG. 1.4. Samos, Heraion: Bronze human-headed bird cauldron attachment. Vathy, AM A 01177.

FIG. 1.5. Samos, Heraion: Hammered-bronze griffin protome. Vathy, AM A 01220.

FIG. 1.6. Samos, Heraion: Hammered-bronze griffin protome. Vathy, AM A 01215.

FIG. 1.7. Samos, Heraion: Cast-bronze griffin protome. Vathy, AM A 00728.

FIG. 1.8. Samos, Heraion: Cast-bronze griffin protome. Vathy, AM DAI B 1473.

FIG. 1.9. Samos, Heraion: Cast-bronze griffin protome. Vathy, AM A 00723.

FIG. 1.10. Samos, Heraion: Cast-bronze griffin protome. Vathy, AM A 00709.

FIG. 1.11. Samos, Heraion: Cast-bronze griffin protome. Vathy, AM A 00756.

FIG. 1.12. Samos, Heraion: Hekatompedos I drawn reconstructed as a Wunderkammer.

FIG. 1.13. Griffin cauldron drawn reconstructed on rod-tripod stand.

FIG. 1.14. Griffin cauldron drawn reconstructed with Heraion protome B 7.

FIG. 1.15. Miletos, Sanctuary of Athena: Cast-bronze griffin protome. Istanbul, AM 6330.

FIG. 1.16. Ephesos, Sanctuary of Artemis: Cast-bronze griffin protome. Ephesos Museum 11/61/87.

FIG. 2.1. Spatiotemporal graph.

FIG. 2.2. Perachora, Sanctuary of Hera Akraia: Hammered-bronze griffin protome. Corinth, AM P 272.

FIG. 2.3. Dodona, Sanctuary of Zeus, Prytaneion: Cast-bronze griffin protome. Ioannina, AM 7494.

FIG. 2.4. Ioannina, Dourouti: Cast-bronze griffin protome. Ioannina, AM 5967.

FIG. 2.5. Argolid, Sanctuary of Hera: Cast-bronze griffin protome. Athens, NM 16563.

FIG. 2.6. Athens, Akropolis: Cast-bronze griffin protome. Athens, NM 6634.

FIG. 2.7. Athens, Akropolis: Cast-bronze griffin head of composite protome. Athens, NM 6635.

FIG. 2.8. Athens, Akropolis: Cast-bronze griffin protome. Athens, NM 6633 (Acropolis Museum since 2009).

FIG. 2.9. Delphi, Sanctuary of Apollo, Alos: Cast-bronze human-headed bird cauldron attachments. DM 7726, 7725.

FIG. 2.10. Delphi, Temenos of Athena Pronaia(?): Cast-bronze human-headed bird cauldron attachment. DM 8398.

FIG. 2.11. Delphi, Sanctuary of Apollo: Cast-bronze head of composite protome. DM 23846.

FIG. 2.12. Olympia, Sanctuary of Zeus: Bronze griffin-and-lion cauldron OM B 4224.

FIG. 2.13. Olympia, Sanctuary of Zeus: Bronze bull cauldron B 5240 (cauldron), B 4422 (bull protome).

FIG. 2.14. Olympia: Bronze human-headed bird cauldron attachment. OM B 5090.

FIG. 2.15. Olympia: Hammered-bronze griffin protome. OM Br 3177.

FIG. 2.16. Olympia: Cast-bronze griffin protome. OM Br 2250 Athens, NM 6160.

FIG. 3 .1. Spatiotemporal graph.

FIG. 3 .2. Praeneste, Barberini Tomb: Bronze griffin cauldron on conical stand. Rome, Villa Giulia Museum, inv. 13177, 13178.

FIG. 3.3. Praeneste, Bernardini Tomb: Bronze griffin cauldron on conical stand. Rome, Villa Giulia Museum, inv. 16128.

FIG. 3 .4. Monterozzi necropolis, Tarquinia: Bronze griffin protomes. Tarquinia, AM CB 262.

FIG. 3.5. Trestina, hoard: Bronze griffin protome. Florence, AM 84484.

FIG. 3 .6. Vetulonia, Circolo dei Lebeti: Bronze lion cauldron. Florence, AM 9619.

FIG. 3 .7. Vetulonia, Circolo dei Lebeti: Bronze griffin cauldron, drawn reconstructed. Florence, AM 9618.

FIG. 3 .8. Vetulonia, Circolo dei Lebeti: Bronze griffin protome, drawn reconstructed.

FIG. 3 .9. Sainte-Gemmes-sur-Loire: Bronze griffin protome. Angers Museum MA 5 R 444.

FIG. 3 .10. Sainte-Colombe-sur-Seine, La Garenne: Bronze griffin cauldron on stand.

FIG. 3 .11. Brolio di Valdichiana, hoard: Bronze griffin protome. Florence, AM 575.

FIG. 3 .12. Chiusi: Bronze fitting. London, BM 1873, 0820.163.

FIG. 3 .13. Latium Vetus, Ficana: Olla on stand, drawn reconstructed. Ostia, Ostia Museum 38252.

FIG. 3 .14. Ager Faliscus, Narce, Pizzo Piede, Tomb 19, XLI: Olla. Rome, Villa Giulia Museum 4374.

FIG. 3.15. Marsiliana d’Albegna necropolis (Grosseto), Tomba degli Avori (Tomb of the Ivories): Ivory comb. Florence, AM 93437.

FIG. 4 .1. Kolaios’s griffin cauldron, drawn reconstructed.

FIG. 5 .1. Fragment of an early Protocorinthian conical terracotta lekythos-oinochoë. New York, MET 1923 (23.160.18).

FIG. 5 .2. As in fig. 5.1: side b.

FIG. 5 .3. Early Protocorinthian aryballos. Berlin, Antikensammlung 3409.

FIG. 5 .4. Olympia: Hammered-bronze sheet with griffin cauldron, crab, bird, snake. OM BE I ie.

FIG. 5.5. Samos, Heraion: Figurative frieze on a Protocorinthian krateriskos, drawn rolled out. Vathy, AM A 01432 (K 02263).

FIG. 5 .6. Athens, Peiraios Street. Graphic drawing of ceramic krater. Athens, NM 810.

FIG. 5 .7. Protoattic ceramic stand, ca. 650. Berlin, Antikensammlung SM 31573 A 41.

FIG. 5 .8. Protoattic amphora, Eleusis, ca. 660. Eleusis, Eleusis Museum 2630.

FIG. 5 .9. As in fig. 5.8: Detail of Gorgon’s head.

FIG. 6.1. Taxidermy hunting trophy.

FIG. 6.2. Taxidermy lion.

PREFACE

THIS BOOK HAS BEEN in the making for a long time, mainly because I have tried to study at close quarters as many of the artifacts discussed in the following chapters as I could. From the very beginning, I decided to focus on materials from excavated contexts, leaving aside unprovenanced holdings in various museums and collections or casting a questioning eye on dealers’ purported proveniences. In antiquity, griffin cauldrons, the wondrous bronze monsters of the book’s title, were distributed in a wide swath of the Mediterranean stretching from Egypt and Cyprus to northern France (Burgundy and the Loire Valley). The same holds true today. However, the fascinating histories of discovery or cultural treatment of their remnants have resulted in even more dispersal in several countries and museums of the contemporary world. For example, finds from the Samian Heraion are in Samos, Berlin, and Athens. Finds from Olympia are at Olympia and Athens. Finds from the Athenian Akropolis are divided between the National Museum at Athens and the Akropolis Museum. This state of fragmentation and wide dispersal speaks volumes about the tendency of our contemporary world to re-create the relics of antiquity in its own bizarre terms even as it complicates attempts for synthesis and comprehensive understanding of the phenomena entangled in the social lives of these objects.

My interest in the Mediterranean of the seventh century was sparked in a series of seminars by Professor William A. P. Childs at Princeton University in the early 1990s CE. Griffin cauldrons from the Samian Heraion and Olympia had been treated in magisterial studies by Ulf Jantzen (1955 CE) and Hans-Volkmar Herrmann (1966, 1979) that answered as many questions as they generated. More recently, important studies by Winfried Held (2000), Ulrich Gehrig (2004), Andreas Scholl (2006), Gudrun Klebinder-Gauss (2007), and Hélène Aurigny (2019) have made available data that enable new approaches within a wider Mediterranean paradigm exceeding the default boundaries of regional or ethnocentric approaches. Each one of them adds a piece in the puzzle of pan-Mediterranean phenomena of connectivity and mobility that only recently scholars have started to untangle. Without these indispensable studies, to which this book owes a great intellectual debt, my attempt at a panoptic view and interpretation would have been impossible. I also owe a great debt to the magisterial restorations of cauldrons from the Barberini and Bernardini tombs, whose marvelous assemblages have been put on display in an exemplary way at Villa Poniatoswki (Museo Etrusco Nazionale di Villa Giulia, Rome). Equally magisterial are the recent restorations of the griffin and lion cauldrons from the Circolo dei Lebeti in Vetulonia (Rafanelli 2015; Cianferoni and Venturini 2016). These important museological developments enable valuable insights in the materiality and visuality of seventh-century cauldrons, themes I have pursued in depth in the pages of this book.

This book expands on ideas that have already appeared in numerous scholarly publications (Papalexandrou 2003–2004, 2010, 2011, 2016a, 2016b, 2016c, 2017). In the last ten years I presented aspects of my research to various academic audiences in Greece, Italy, and the United States whose formative feedback informed my ideas, method, and approach. Most fruitfully influential has been my participation in the wonderful workshop Material Entanglements in the Ancient Mediterranean and Beyond, organized by Marian Feldman (The Johns Hopkins University) and Antigone Zournatzi (National Hellenic Research Foundation) under the auspices of the Connecting Art Histories initiative of the Getty Foundation (2018–2019 CE).

The manuscript was revised in the difficult months of spring and summer 2020, when I had minimal or no access to library resources. Two important publications, Aurigny 2019 and Walter, Clemente, and Niemeier 2019, reached me very late in the process; as a result I have not been able to engage with them as much as I would have under normal circumstances.

All dates in this book are BCE unless otherwise indicated.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

RESEARCH AND TRAVEL for this study were generously facilitated by a series of Faculty Research Assignments granted by the College of Fine Arts at the University of Texas at Austin throughout the last decade. This study would have dragged on for many more years had not Provost Maurie Mckinnis entrusted me with a Provost’s Authors Fellowship (2019–2020 CE). Chapter 6 was written in the productive atmosphere of the National Gallery’s Center of Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, Washington, DC, during a Visiting Fellowship in fall 2015. Chapters 1 to 3 were slowly drafted during late nights at the hospitable Blegen Library of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens in the spring of 2017 CE. The University of Texas at Austin has proven incomparably ideal for the pursuit of interests in Mediterranean archaeology. My research in Italy would have been impossible without the rich resources that my colleague Professor (emerita) Ingrid Edlund-Berry built over several years here at the libraries of the university. From the very beginning, she embraced the project and stirred me into the wonderful world of Italian archaeology with humor and wise expertise. John Clarke, Penelope Davies, and Nayla Muntasser, my colleagues and fellows at the Center for the Study of Ancient Italy (CSAI) here at the University of Texas at Austin, provided exempla of scholarship, inspiration, and moral support when this was most needed. My project has been under the generous aegis of CSAI throughout.

I owe a great debt to Joanna Hitchcock, former director of the University of Texas Press, for her interest and kind invitation to submit this project to the university press of my academic home. My editor, Jim Burr, showed unmitigated patience for many years and took the project under his capable wing. My colleague Professor (Emerita) Denise Schmandt-Besserat embraced it with equal interest at the early stages of development. Sheila Winchester, humanities bibliographer at the University of Texas at Austin, provided her expertise, insights, and valuable help for many years. Sydney Kilgore and Mark Doroba, of the Visual Resources Collection of my department, put to work great skills and their genuine interest in my project. Paul Psoinos’s copy editing skills improved the manuscript considerably and I thank him for this.

I also acknowledge the manifold support of numerous colleagues and friends in several countries and institutions: Hélène Aurigny, Giorgos Bourogiannis, Panagiotis Chatzidakis, Kalliopi Christophi, Fabio Colivicchi, Braden Cordivari, Lindy Crewe, Einav Dembin, Sophie Descamps, Martine Dewailly, Marian Feldman, Lucio Fiorini, Norbert Franken, Juliette de la Genière, Sarah Graff, Leah Hansard, Eleni Hasaki, Joachim Heiden, Linda Henderson, John Huehnergard, Amalia Kakissis, Andromachi Karanika, Thanasis Katsaras, Michael Kerschner, Gudrun Klebinder-Gauss, Stamatia Ladikou, Joan Mertens, Michael Padgett, Lenka Paleologou, Arto Penttinen, Platon Petridis, Emily Petrowski, Jessica Powers, Susan Rather, Leticia Rodriguez, Brian Rose, Vanessa Rousseau, Agnes Schwarzmaier, Michael Seymour, Sania Shifferd, Ioulia Tzonou, Andreas Vlachopoulos, Natalia Vogeikoff-Brogan, Louis Waldman, Christopher Wood, and Antigone Zournatzi.

I express a great thanks to my fellow Provost’s Authors, who provided inspiration, ideas, and moral support in the last fifteen months of research and writing, especially during the adverse months of spring and summer 2020, when my manuscript was revised: Syed Akbar Hyder, Tracie Matysik, Eric McDaniel, Louisa Nardini, and Domino Perez.

Last but not least, I owe enormous gratitude to my wife, Amy, and daughter, Christina, for their patience and willingness, as they put it, to chase griffins and be chased by them with me from Cyprus to Burgundy. Their love, support, and humor have sustained me throughout, and it is to them that this book is duly dedicated.

FIG. 0.1. Distribution map of griffi n cauldrons discovered around the Mediterranean. Map by Matilde Grimaldi.

Introduction

IN THE YEARS AROUND 700 THE temenos of Apollo at Delphi came to possess an incomparable object of extraordinary technical complexity, value, and beauty. This artifact was in the shape of a large cauldron made of bronze and measuring at least one meter in height. It belonged, that is, to a type of material culture rarely associated today with any standards, however loosely conceived, of value or beauty. Visitors to the archaeological museum of Delphi usually bypass the only surviving component of this originally impressive cauldron. It is displayed just steps away from the entrance, at the beginning of a presentational scheme that obeys strict rules of temporal sequence. Hung high up in an unimaginatively composed vitrine of paratactically displayed similar artifacts, this fragment is now a miserable remnant of a disembodied monster. A good part of the head survives, along with a stretch of the muscled neck of a griffin, a hybrid monster of Near Eastern origin comprising the body of a lion and the head of an eagle (fig. 0.2).¹ Its unwelcoming otherness is still evident in the scaly texture of its skin, which still preserves a corded volute hanging down from the top of its head. Forty-two centimeters high, this artifact beckons viewers as intensely as it did around 700. We do not know, however, what its viewers could have known about it. In the Bronze Age, ferocious griffins accompanied divine beings. Later in the seventh century, Aristeas of Prokonnesos described them as guardians of gold perpetually at war with the one-eyed Arimaspoi somewhere east of Skythia. Hesiod is also reported to have been the first to weave marvelous tales about them.²

FIG. 0.2. Delphi, Sanctuary of Apollo: Hammered-bronze griffin protome. Photo: Philippe Collet. Delphi Museum, 30933. EFA neg. N41-001. © Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports, Ephorate of Antiquities of Phokis, Delphi Archaeological Museum.

The archaeological jargon for this type of mimetic work has been bequeathed to us from antiquity: scholars refer to it as a protome (προτομή), translated in the ninth edition of H. G. Liddell and R. Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1940) as a front part cut off. This mode of representation has been common since classical antiquity, but in Greece at least it was unprecedented when our cauldron made its way to Apollo’s temenos. Upon its appearance, it was as innovative as the so-called bronze sirens, or human-headed birds, pairs of which sometimes faced each other on the rims of cauldrons similar to our Delphic example (figs. 2.9, 2.10, 2.12, 2.14).³ No less radically novel was the three-dimensional representational mode of the griffins: users and viewers were expected to make visual contact with and react to seemingly fully fleshed beings whose posture and attitude were unprecedently lifelike. Our cauldron was equipped with four to six outward-directed griffin protomes, all of equal size and form, which were riveted at equal intervals all around it just below its rim. A physical encounter with it entailed an intense sensory negotiation of the physical nature of these threatening monsters and the materiality of the artifact to which they were attached. No matter how we define and interpret their effect today, it must have been very strong, if not alluring. Provided that they would have been allowed to interact with or use this cauldron, a few visitors would have understood it as a daidalon: an intricately crafted functional artifact, often jointed together from several parts, whose technical, formal, and sensory qualities (sheen, resonance, color, size, shape, figurative content, ornaments) were viewed as divine in quality and perhaps origin.⁴ By their nature, daidala were unexceptionally wondrous artifacts that bedazzled the mind. Sometimes endowed with animation and autonomous inner life, they were seen as dangerously seductive or even deceptive.⁵

Griffin cauldrons represent the most prolific industry of metals in the seventh century.⁶ Its output is archaeologically documented in a vast area stretching from Egypt and the eastern Mediterranean island of Cyprus to Burgundy and the Loire Valley in France (fig. 0.1). In the eastern Mediterranean, griffin cauldrons have been documented in a very small number of elite tombs (Cyprus, SW Turkey) that exhibit imported ideas (Salamis, Cyprus, Tomb 79) or actual artifacts (Elmalı) from the Aegean.⁷ On very few locations, the griffin protomes coexisted not only with human-headed birds but also with inward-looking roaring lions that prominently display their sharp incisors as if poised to devour flesh from the interior of the cauldron (figs. 2.12, 3.6).⁸ Griffin cauldrons have been documented in contexts that have also yielded cauldrons equipped with attachments or protomes in the form of bulls’ heads positioned around the rim in a manner similar to the positioning of griffin protomes (fig. 2.13). Delphi is no exception, but it remains unclear whether our cauldron functioned side by side with bull cauldrons or not.⁹

An impressive number of intricate artifacts like our Delphic cauldron dominated the material record of Greek sanctuaries throughout the seventh century. This study focuses on this evidence, especially on the numerous remnants of cauldrons retrieved at Olympia, Delphi, and the Heraion of Samos, a major production center of griffin cauldrons throughout the seventh century.¹⁰ Much smaller numbers of griffin cauldrons made their way to regional or local sanctuaries as well. Qualitatively outstanding specimens also made their way to the most affluent assemblages of material wealth in the Italic Peninsula (Praeneste, Vetulonia) and France (Vix), where the relevant evidence is predominantly funereal in character.¹¹ It was probably in the meeting arenas of great sanctuaries, such as Delphi or Olympia, that Italian elites encountered griffin protomes and the interactive practices associated with them. The funereal assemblages of Praeneste and Vetulonia bear witness to how lavishly Italian elites embraced the materiality and visuality of the griffin cauldron. The strong impact of this type and the practices it stood for in Italy is made manifest by its replication, often awkward and uncertain but always imaginative, in other materials as well.¹² A few skeuomorphic attempts, no less tentative than the Italic specimens, have also been documented in certain areas of Greece and the Aegean (Crete, Attika).¹³ No less than in Italy, they mirror partially informed but confidently motivated responses to the sumptuous metallic prototypes that inspired them.

What is the reason for this Mediterranean success of the griffin cauldron? What exactly made these objects desirable? How and by whom were they used? What was their religious significance? How did they circulate in the wider Mediterranean networks of long-and short-distance interaction? And how did their viewers and users interact with them? To grapple with these questions, this study focuses on the seventh century—the main chronological framework of this study—as a time of wonder and radical innovations in the material and visual cultures of the Mediterranean.¹⁴ Historians of the ancient world often resort to the metaphor of the orientalizing Mediterranean as a cauldron in order to communicate aspects of life and human interaction around the Mediterranean Sea.¹⁵ This may be fanciful, but it is apt for translating the unfathomable physical and conceptual scale of the great sea into a graspable and familiar category. Cauldrons have always been good to think with. They possess enclosed spaces, they are precious, and they bring people together. Their rims are tantalizing thresholds to thrilling delights, yet like the Mediterranean shores they may be populated with mystique, promise, and danger. It is certainly not by accident that Odysseus conjures up a boiling cauldron to speak of ghastly Charybdis.¹⁶ His description of the horrible Skylla has correspondences with and seems to have been consciously or unconsciously inspired by the multiheaded griffin cauldrons that are the focus of this book.¹⁷ The Early Classical iconography of Herakles traversing the Mediterranean inside the golden cauldron (dinos or lebēs) of Helios clearly echoes the pan-Mediterranean dimension of cauldrons.¹⁸

A primary aim of this study is to delineate a Mediterranean history of the griffin cauldron as the par-excellence symptomatic phenomenon of the new material and visual culture of the seventh-century or orientalizing Mediterranean. This is a period of expanding horizons brought about by the circulation of people, objects, and ideas, a great many of which originated in the eastern Mediterranean in the wake of the aggressive expansion of the Assyrian empire in the late eighth century.¹⁹ Although the term orientalizing has been subject to scholarly criticism in the last two decades, I retain it as a descriptor of the griffin cauldrons in order to acknowledge the origin of the ideas embodied in them.²⁰ However, its use in this study does not imply that the makers of the griffin cauldrons or their users were necessarily conscious of orientalizing as some scholars have understood it. Ian Morris and Thomas Brisart, for example, have seen orientalizing as a material connection to the East, ideologically fraught and politically motivated.²¹ Rather, orientalizing in this study is the ambient cultural field of ideas and practices that informed the invention and ritual use of the griffin cauldron. It was as multifaceted and nuanced as its manifestations in space and time.

The intensity of this phenomenon was so strong, long lasting, and irreversibly impactful that scholars have resorted to describing it as a veritable revolution.²² This revolution is manifest in the adoption, elaboration, and dissemination of new types of material culture (e.g., engraved Tridacna shells, so-called Cypro-Phoenician bowls, exquisitely carved ivories, artifacts made of faience), as well as social practices like the banquet or technologies of communication such as alphabetic writing and figurative narrative.²³ These are obvious and well-discussed examples, forming a variegated backdrop against which the novelty of the griffin cauldron can be assessed. However, in an important way griffin cauldrons were exceptional. I argue that these intricate artifacts played a pivotal role in the introduction of lifelike illusionism in the material and visual culture of the time. The modes of response to lifelike illusionism—understood here as techniques for its active and meaningful negotiation—are a central thematic focus of this study.

A fundamental premise of my investigation is that the illusionism of griffin cauldrons necessitated the creation of new modes of interaction with material and visual culture. These modes of response, however, were physically and cognitively accessible only to a very narrow circle of users, either visitors to sanctuaries in Greece or the high elites of Cyprus, western Asia Minor, Italy, and France. The former had exclusive access to the cauldrons and the interactive experiences afforded by them through mechanisms strictly regulated by sanctuary authorities. The latter embraced the inter active character of the cauldrons in order to envelop themselves in an otherworldly mystique that emanated from their concomitant claims to rare experiences. According to this interpretation, our Delphic cauldron may have been grand and visually ebullient but its social function cannot be illuminated unless we determine its interactive role in the actuality of the sanctuary’s life. Likewise, one may easily label the griffin cauldron from Sainte-Colombe-sur-Seine, near Vix (locality La Garenne), found in a lavishly furnished tomb of the late sixth century, as a status-enhancing item that asserted the prestige and perhaps claims to power of its owners. However, this label does not explain why this particular type of object was desirable. Neither does it illuminate the interactive life afforded by its materiality and visuality. What work, physical and conceptual, did this alien object perform for its owners and users? And how did they respond to its affective properties?

The formulation of these questions is possible within the framework of a now-fundamental theoretical tenet in the archaeological and art-historical study of the past: all items of material and visual culture are no less objects of human experience than they are decisive and active shapers of social life. Alfred Gell has emphasized that artifacts exercise their own active agency not only toward viewers or users but throughout their surrounding environments.²⁴ That is, they shape their perceptual environments no less than they do the responses that they make possible by means of their physical attributes. The exploration of the meaning of artifacts in social life entails careful attention to the dialectic action, the physical and conceptual interchange between artifact and user or viewer. Or, to think in terms of the useful notion of entanglement, one may theorize this dialectic action within a complex web of interactions framed by a certain environment within which artifacts shape other artifacts and are shaped by them.²⁵ This interactive engagement is conditioned by the prevalent cultural norms about the nature of beings and the relationships that they make possible. These norms usually survive only in traces that the analyst has to tease out from a plethora of items of evidence, always bearing in mind that the artifacts themselves contribute to the formation, negotiation, and establishment of these cultural norms. The active roles of artifacts—their capacity to act as persons or impersonations—are often programmed into their physical characteristics. Materials and their sensory qualities (aptic, visual, tactile, olfactory, aural) encode myriad effects that are projected out to the ambient environment of an artifact. By ambient environment I mean the space that determines the performativity of an artifact. My analysis presumes that artifacts are agents of action or performers themselves within a well-ordained scenic stage or setting that I term here a performance arena, an ambient space within which what the artifact sends forth and what in response a viewer or user sends back meet each other in order to generate meaning. In The Visual Poetics of Power (Papalexandrou 2005), I borrowed this notion from the late John Miles Foley’s work on ethnopoetics to describe an essential characteristic of the agency and functions of tripod cauldrons: tripod cauldrons defined a material and symbolic space around them which is to be understood as a performance arena . . . the physical focus or epicenter of performative events that actualized the meanings and messages embedded in them.²⁶ In that case, a rich body of evidence made possible the association of the tripod cauldron with the performance of oral events like poetry. In this book, I will follow a similar path to conceptualize the griffin cauldron as an interactive epicenter within an arena of performative events that were primarily perceptual and noetic. I will be arguing that visual contact with the griffin cauldrons constituted a form of performance that established an inextricable link between viewers or users and griffin cauldrons. In sanctuaries this link was a quintessential element of religious experience. In funerary contexts it had to do with induction into special orders of experience: for example, the elite banqueting event involving ritualized wine drinking. Everywhere, I argue, griffin cauldrons functioned as sites of wonder and rare experiences. This is primarily because as integral artifacts, the griffin cauldrons were perceived as animate monstrous beings that inhabited a sphere of existence well beyond the bounds of the ordinary.

Indeed, the combination of a large container and front parts cut off of monstrous animals was, and still is, out of the ordinary in many ways. In technical terms, it entailed the mechanical attachment of the heavy protome to the shoulder of the vessel by means of rivets minuscule enough to remain unnoticed or at least largely unobtrusive to the observer’s field of vision. Hammered-griffin protomes were particularly heavy, as the weight of the metal was severely compounded by the filling material concealed in the interior of the protome—in the case of our Delphic cauldron this filling was densely packed asphalt or bitumen enveloped by the dexterously hammered sheet that formed the thin but very richly textured skin of the protome.²⁷ This characteristic of protomes did not change when early in the seventh-century workshops in Greece started producing cast protomes using the lost-wax technique. The two modes coexisted for more than one generation. This technical change enabled the makers of protomes to engage in a sophisticated and far-reaching exploration of the monstrous physiognomy of griffins. Specimens found in the great sanctuaries of Samos, Olympia, and Delphi attest the artisans’ constant efforts to endow these objects with intensely affective properties akin to those of living creatures in the natural world. A few of these attained truly monumental dimensions by combining a long, hammered neck and a solid-cast head (fig. 2.7). These have been documented only in the great sanctuaries of Greece, but none survives today in its entirety. In the middle of the fifth century, Herodotus witnessed an impressively monumental specimen in the form of an old, revered relic treasured inside the great Temple of Hera at Samos (fig. 4.1). His account is our only surviving testimony, and therefore extremely useful in this study, for this still enigmatic group of artifacts (Hdt. 4.152).²⁸

The use of the qualifier enigmatic is justified as much by the paucity of information about griffin cauldrons as by their categorical hybridity. The paucity of information is striking when one compares the abundance of textual or figurative testimonies about the tripod cauldron, a technically complex artifact closely related to the griffin cauldron.²⁹ Tripod cauldrons are significant objects in the Iliad and the Odyssey, and they remain so until the end of antiquity.³⁰ The griffin cauldron, by contrast, has a low discursive profile, and one wonders why. The contrast with the abundance of archaeological evidence and its wide distribution is puzzling and argues against the established understanding of griffin cauldrons as status-enhancing dedications in Greece. The categorical hybridity, on the other hand, is manifest when one turns to the primary physical component parts of the griffin cauldron. The hammered cauldron, often portable and independent of its bearing support, is primarily a costly and capacious container of liquids or solids. References in Homer are explicit that cauldrons (sg. λέβης, pl. λέβητες) enjoyed the status of a measure of value (along with tripod cauldrons) in the heroic systems of valorization and exchange.³¹ It may be that the addition of protomes and attachments was motivated by the need to figuratively label this currency. However, if this was the original motivation, it was a most costly and the least practical one. Perhaps the concept of intentional hybrids may at least point to the motivations underlying the creation of the type. These shock, change, challenge, revitalize or disrupt through deliberate, intended fusions and in so doing they create . . . a double consciousness.³² The generations of pilgrims and users in Greece and Italy who encountered the first griffin cauldrons would have had to reconcile their shocking novelty with their established ideas about bronze vessels of this type.

Who was the author of this innovation, and what or whose interests did it serve? The first question cannot be answered with precision. It is a fact that no griffin cauldrons have been documented in the Near East.³³ The type seems to have been invented in the Aegean, but this does not necessarily mean that ascription of authorship can be determined or credited in ethnic terms.³⁴ There is consensus that the visual apparatus of the first generation of griffin cauldrons has close stylistic or technical affinities with the Early Iron Age visual and material culture of North Syria.³⁵ Scholars have long been willing to entertain the idea that migrant or itinerant craftsmen from this area invented the griffin cauldron and introduced it into the Aegean world and farther west.³⁶ As I discuss in detail below, seeking determinative labels like Greek or Near Eastern is devoid of meaning and is a hermeneutic dead end.

Regarding the second question, I argue against the prevailing view that griffin cauldrons were status-enhancing dedicatory objects mediating between elite donors and divine beings.³⁷ Even if this seems to be indicated by the textually attested case of Kolaios’s exceptionally lavish dedication at the Samian Heraion (Hdt. 4.152), the model that it suggests may apply for but a very small percentage of the surviving record of griffin cauldrons. Rather, in Greece at least it is preferable to explain the adoption of the orientalizing materiality and visuality through the systematic efforts of sanctuary authorities to adjust to or even control the realities and challenges of the new era.³⁸ Within a framework of religious practices, sanctuaries made possible rare and extraordinary experiences for select visitors who enhanced their cognitive and sensory symbolic capital through physical and cognitive interaction with griffin cauldrons. In the last generation, many analysts of the material and visual culture of the eighth and the seventh century argued for the social function of significant objects. This proposition has yielded many insights regarding the role of material culture in the formation and negotiation of social identities within the evolving fabric of the city-state. However, these insights have been reached at the expense of attention to the materiality (or visuality) of these significant objects as well as to their sensory qualities and the responses that they instigated. I offer this study both as a corrective to this neglect and as a plea for the need to ask new questions about the properties of the numerous categories of artifacts that comprise the rich material register of the seventh century.

More than any other type of orientalizing artifact, the griffin cauldron seems to call attention to its monstrous appendages. The front part cut off of griffins, otherworldly creatures of the margins and worlds beyond, may be only partial quotations of the entire beast, but the bodiless heads came alive as never before. Their eyes were always endowed with the capacity to see and be seen, but the ravages of time have deprived the cauldrons’ remnants of this quintessential characteristic of their animated nature. The intricately rendered amphibian eyes of hammered griffins like those of our griffin cauldron or the inset, humanlike eyes of cast protomes darted their powerful gaze away from the cauldron’s interior even as their wide-open beaks broadcast deafening shrieks all around. Since the nineteenth century CE these effects have been viewed as apotropaic (prophylactic or guardian) in nature.³⁹ Scholars, however, have never offered suggestions as to the nature of danger or threat these monsters supposedly guarded against. In a critical moment of the Iliad, we learn that theft of a sanctuary’s valuable possessions was always possible in the world being depicted.⁴⁰ Yet is one seriously to consider that the bronze griffins were perceived to keep harm away from the cauldron or its interior? It is possible that at a basic level, appendages like griffin protomes (lion protomes have also been retrieved at Olympia, Praeneste, and Vetulonia) functioned as scarecrows—but one would still have to explain why so much technical virtuosity was expended on the lifelike visual apparatus of griffin cauldrons. Tripod cauldrons were equally costly and prestigious artifacts (daidala) that were produced concurrently with griffin cauldrons throughout the seventh century. They were no less worthy of the designation agalmata (objects of delight; ornaments) than were griffin cauldrons. There is no indication, however, that they were ever equipped with apotropaic attachments, and one wonders why. Their explanation as apotropaic does not go far enough to explain the affective properties of the griffin cauldron. Neither is this function compellingly suggested by the few pictorial sources representing griffin cauldrons (chapter 5).

This book explores the effect of griffin cauldrons on their viewers and users. Instead of treating the cauldrons and their components as items exemplifying an evolutionary stage grafted into a wider, overarching narrative (e.g., that of Greek art), I seek to unravel the nature of contact (visual, psychological, sensory) elicited by these objects. This step will provide insights as to why all of a sudden they became desirable and remained so for at least a hundred years after their appearance in Greece and elsewhere in the Mediterranean. These questions have not been addressed in scholarship, mainly because for a long time the archaeological enterprise has been preoccupied with basic archaeological problems such as defining dates and styles as well as techniques and places of manufacture. These concerns have been dealt with in an admirable fashion in a series of studies that contain the final publication of large numbers of cauldrons from a number of Greek sanctuaries.⁴¹ In this study, I draw from these studies even as I contend that it is time for scholarship to take the understanding of the griffin cauldron even further by formulating new questions and putting aside old scholarly preoccupations.

For example, much ink and energy have been spent on unraveling the origin of the griffin cauldron. Since the nineteenth century CE, ethnocentrically inspired archaeologies have debated whether the invention of this intricate type can be ascribed to the creative energies of the purported Greek genius during its most formative period (e.g., Jantzen 1955) or whether they were products of the Near Eastern realm (Maxwell-Hyslop 1956, 155–156; Rathje 1979, 165; Rolley et al. 2004–2005). The stakes behind this question were high because of the quality and quantity of the evidence and the technical or artistic innovations it implied. Labels matter. If they were Greek products, they could be counted on to substantiate an old evolutionary schema of progress premised on Greece improving on ideas originating in the Near East by breathing new and creative life into them. If not, this foundational schema could severely threaten claims about European cultural superiority.

Well into the twenty-first century CE these binary conundrums have had no value or led to roadblocks. Recent studies have argued very convincingly that retrojected labels (Greek; Near Eastern) have no substantive value or overlap only very partially with considerations prevalent in the use period of these intricate artifacts.⁴² In this book I subscribe to the idea that culture and its products are fluid and the cauldron’s vital contexts in their very nature (e.g., their physical and conceptual frameworks as objects of experience) were sites in which the idea of ethnic culture and concomitant boundaries either fell apart or was of limited concern or relevance. In this era of emphasis on networks operating on a very widely expanded Mediterranean canvas, griffin cauldrons may be shown to have functioned as special nodes in a web of symbolically transcultural subjectivities.

It is therefore imperative that I make it clear that although the majority of the evidence for my exploration comes from Greece and the Aegean as well as Italy, the phenomena I try to address have to do with an area stretching from Lake Van (eastern Turkey) to the Guadalquivir of southwestern Iberia. My aim is to ask how radically novel objects like the orientalizing cauldron actively shaped new categories of encounters with material and visual culture. Possible answers to this question are to be found in the physicality of the cauldrons themselves and especially in what it suggests about the modes of viewer or user response that these artifacts made possible.

These questions have not been addressed before, mainly because of the prevalent epistemic constraints framing the production of knowledge about the cauldrons. To put it simply, for a long time we have been missing the forest (viz. the cauldrons as integral entities) for the trees (viz. their dispersed individual components). Owing to the physical nature of the cauldrons, archaeology has usually retrieved the individual components of cauldrons, attachments in the shape of griffins, human-headed birds, and lions. Cauldrons retrieved entire from archaeological contexts (e.g., the Barberini or Bernardini Tomb; Salamis, Tomb 79; Sainte-Colombe-sur-Seine, near Vix) are exceptionally rare, but close attention to their materiality and visuality offers insights as to how the now-disiecta membra of disintegrated cauldrons from Olympia, Samos, Delphi, and other sanctuaries were constitutive of originally rare and complex experiences. However, modes of archaeological publication and their inherent foci and intellectual agendas have reified these dispersed parts. One may even argue that in this treatment griffin protomes, human-headed birds, and lion protomes have acquired a new ontological status. Indeed, they have been viewed as individual art objects, in part because this is how they have survived and in part because this is largely how these items have been acquired and valorized by Western museums and collections. It is significant, for example, that the series of human-headed birds (sirens) from Olympia has been published separately from the griffin protomes, a separation reflected in the museological treatment of these artifacts as well.⁴³ In this book I try to redress this case of perhaps necessary but ultimately misleading scholarly treatment. I say misleading because the modes of archaeological publication have produced faulty assumptions as to how these objects were experienced in antiquity. Archaeological publications make things wonderfully and admirably accessible in physical and cognitive terms, but this does not mean that this artificial accessibility has anything to do with what prevailed in antiquity. Following the paradigm set forth in my monograph on tripod cauldrons, this study programmatically sets out to rehabilitate the integrity of the griffin cauldron as an assemblage of multiple component parts created to work in tandem with and not in isolation from one another. Asking who had access to these intricate objects (or for that matter to anything artifactual unearthed by archaeology) and how, how often, and under what circumstances is an imperative desideratum of archaeological inquiry. Equally important is the question of the nature of physical and cognitive contact with griffin cauldrons. The focus of my analysis is therefore to place the cauldrons at the epicenter of experiential entanglements in their intended functional contexts. This necessitates as much attention to the physicality of the cauldrons’ actual remains as to an imaginative—and always tentative—reconstruction of their original visuality and materiality.

The origins of this study are to be traced in my long-standing preoccupation with the tripod cauldron, the most prestigious type of votive object in Greece during the Early Iron Age and long afterward.⁴⁴ It is still a common perception that from the late eighth century onward tripod cauldrons were replaced by orientalizing cauldrons, mainly because scholars assume that the elites, traditional or newly formed, would have been quick to embrace the thrillingly novel products of the new, orientalizing era. This perception is wrong. Tripod cauldrons never fell out of use after production of the technically and visually consummate series archaeologically documented in the great Panhellenic sanctuaries came to its end around 700.⁴⁵ Moreover, the broad range of their semantic values established during the Early Iron Age kept evolving for centuries.⁴⁶ The griffin cauldron, on the other hand, never came to be invested with the symbolism and the long-lasting resonance of the Greek tripod cauldron. The end of the standard series around the last quarter of the seventh century still remains unexplained. A plethora of evidence, however, from the Aegean, the Greek mainland, and Italy shows that, unlike the tripod cauldron, the griffin cauldron witnessed a vibrant career both inside and outside Greece. In this book I try to account for this phenomenon by turning to the objects themselves as well as their contexts of consumption and what these indicate about the griffin cauldrons’ role as harbingers of radical novel modes of seeing and being seen.

A CHAPTER-BY-CHAPTER ITINERARY

This book is organized into three parts. Part I, entitled Griffin Cauldrons in Contexts of Life and Death, is divided into three chapters (1 to 3) that discuss the existing evidence for griffin cauldrons in terms of the contextual circumstances of