|
Date: |
|
Description: | Cast copper-alloy circular horse-harness pendant with openwork decoration. The pendant is slightly convex and has traces of gilding. There is a suspension loop at the top, turned at right angles to the rest of the pendant. The object is badly worn and corroded, and the lower edge is damaged, with two perforations now worn through. The arrangement of the perforations is almost, but not completely, symmetrical about a central vertical axis.
Steven Ashley has seen an image of this pendant and has commented that although the zoomorphic decoration appears at first sight to be two addorsed birds (or wyverns) with heads turned to confront each other, on comparison with the good parallel of SF-951660 it becomes more likely that what is depicted is a single quadruped, probably a lion. The animal is shown in profile with forequarters towards the right (as in the image), standing on three legs and with one foreleg raised. The head is turned to look backwards towards the raised tail. A central vertical bar runs down from the loop to pass across (apparently in front of) the body.
The vertical bar recalls the Tree of Life, originally a classical motif, but one which re-appears in many classical revivals including 12th-century Romanesque art. Lions are also a common motif in Romanesque art, and so art-historical considerations provide a reasonably certain 12th-century date for this pendant. | Format: | text/html | License: | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ | Publisher: | The Portable Antiquities Scheme | Rights holder: | The Portable Antiquities Scheme | Subjects: | archaeology | Temporal: | 1100
1200 | Source: | Portable Antiquities | Creator: | Sally Worrell | Identifier: | http://www.finds.org.uk/database/artefac... | Language: | en-GB | Format: | text/html | Go to resource |
|
More Like this...
-
-
-
BROOCH
Copper-alloy disc brooch, now worn…
-
-
-
-
-
-
BUCKLE
A corroded, partial, small copper-alloy…
-
|