Trefoil Oinochoe Handle

This bronze handle belonged to a trefoil oinochoe, and a considerable remnant of the rim remains attached to the slot in the upper part of the handle. The handle consists of a vertical section, flat on the underside, convex on the outside, and marked by two parallel ridges running down the center. The top of the handle ends in a lion head that would have looked into the mouth of the vessel. It is flanked by two smaller, reclining lions whose bodies curve antithetically outward above the rim. They are carefully modeled in the round. Their curving tails, rendered in relief and ending in oval tufts, are placed symmetrically on either side of the back of the main lion head. The base plate consists of a large palmette of nine petals that grows out of a central space bounded by a curving ridge. On either side, serpents with their tails curled into volutes extend their heads upward and outward to fit the convex curve of the vessel’s shoulder. Two rivets, each placed through the snake’s back at a point just before the head projects from the handle, are preserved on the back of the handle. There appears to be a third rivet projecting from the underside of the left snake’s head. The snakes’ eyes are modeled in relief. The underside of each is marked by a shallow curving channel that extends almost to the tip of the head. The upper end of the base plate consists of a low convex band of beads or tongues, each separated by narrow ridges to form a transitional element from which the handle proper rises (1). C. Stibbe has dated this handle to the second quarter of the sixth century BCE. The palmette type belongs to his “Ripe Style” (2). He cites a close parallel in a Lakonian black-figure vase in the Archäologisches Institut, University of Zurich, which he dates to c. 560 BCE (3). Therefore, this handle was probably produced by a Lakonian workshop active during the latter part of the first half of the sixth century BCE, or one at Tarantum, Sparta’s only colonial foundation in the west. NOTES: 1. Similar in some respects is a handle in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (inv. no. 99.461); see M. Comstock and C. C. Vermeule, Greek, Etruscan and Roman Bronzes in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Greenwich, CT, 1971) 291, no. 416 (19.7 cm high). Here, however, the central lion’s head is missing and the volutes from which the lower palmette springs in smaller, upward-curving volutes rather than in snake heads. 2. For palmettes on Greek vase handles, see C. M. Stibbe, “Archaic Greek Bronze Palmettes,” Bulletin antieke beschaving: Annual Papers on Classical Archaeology 72 (1997): 37-64. 3. Id., “Eine archaische Bronzekanne in Basel,” Antike Kunst 37 (1994): 108-20, esp. 117, fig. 2. Stibbe believes Weber’s dating of the piece to the second half of the sixth century is too late; see T. Weber, Bronzekannen: Studien zu ausgewahlten archaischen und klassischen Oinochoenformen aus Metall in Griechenland und Etrurien (Frankfurt, 1983) 249, no. I.B.12, pl. 4. David G. Mitten