Romano-Egyptian Bronze Harpocrates-Eros Figure, Hellenistic Style

Egypt, Romano-Egyptian. A nude child god cast in the round at miniature scale, standing with the weight easing onto one leg, small wings lifting behind the shoulders, and the right hand raised so a finger rests at the lips. The modeling is soft and boyish, rounded belly and thighs beneath a heavy cap of curls, the surface now mottled green and brown from long burial. Two divinities meet in the pose: the winged Eros of Greek and Roman art and Harpocrates, the infant Horus, whose childish finger-sucking Roman viewers read instead as a command for silence. Conceived wholly within the Hellenistic vocabulary rather than the Egyptianizing one, figures of this type served household devotion in Roman Egypt as portable guardians of secrets and wards against harm. Cast in leaded bronze, likely by the lost-wax method. The name Harpocrates is a Greek rendering of the Egyptian Har-pa-khered, "Horus the Child." Egyptian artists showed the infant Horus with a finger in his mouth, a wholly conventional sign of infancy; Greek and Roman viewers misread the gesture as an injunction to silence and recast the god accordingly, making him a patron of secrets, mysteries, and discretion. The misreading proved durable, surviving into Renaissance emblem books and modern usage. In Roman Egypt the child god slid easily into the visual language of Eros, the winged putto already ubiquitous in Hellenistic and Roman art. The result is a hybrid of the sort seen here: the body and wings of Cupid carrying the Egyptian gesture and the Egyptian promise of protection. Figures conceived this way, in Hellenistic rather than Egyptianizing conventions, are nonetheless catalogued with Egyptian material because of the deity they name, a convention observed in older collection catalogues. A Certificate of Authenticity will accompany all winning bids. Item # 204566

Estimate:$225

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