Pair of 19th C. Neoclassical Urn Lamps w/ Rams' Heads & Maenads

Europe, Neoclassical revival. A pair of cast brass urns, verdigris-patinated and later fitted for electricity, each shaped as a calyx krater with a gadrooned everted rim and a pair of ram's head handles whose curling horns and fleece are crisply modeled. Around each body runs a relief frieze of dancing maenads, drapery swept back in mid-step, the companions of Dionysos caught in ecstatic procession. Each vessel rests on a stepped square plinth ornamented in relief with lyres on two faces and laurel branches issuing from a shell on the remaining two, the whole set on a beaded and egg-molded foot. Burgundy silk-form shades of pagoda-square outline surmount the pair, each capped by a cast zinc pinecone finial, itself an old Bacchic emblem echoing the thyrsos borne by the dancers below. The maenad frieze belongs to one of the most durable motifs in European decorative art. Ancient Greek reliefs of the dancing thiasos, copied in Roman marble and rediscovered through the so-called Borghese and Neo-Attic vases, supplied eighteenth and nineteenth century founders with a ready vocabulary of whirling drapery and raised thyrsoi. Piranesi's engravings and the Grand Tour trade in reduced bronze urns carried the type across Europe, and by the later nineteenth century the calyx krater on a lyre-ornamented plinth had become standard grammar for mantel garnitures, clock cases, and eventually lamps. The pinecone finial is not merely decorative filler. In classical iconography the pinecone crowns the thyrsos, the fennel staff carried by Dionysos and his maenads, and it survived into the Renaissance and beyond as a symbol of fertility and regeneration. Its appearance atop these shades is a small piece of iconographic consistency rarely thought through by later assemblers. Item # 204719

Estimate:$700

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