The girl stands on a curled-up lion, and griffins springing from her shoulders help support the mirror disk. She holds a pomegranate in her left hand and is nude except for a necklace and a strap from which hang a crescent-shaped amulet and a ring. Her nudity and the animals that surround her bring to mind images of the Mistress of Animals, an ancient Near Eastern deity who contributed characteristics to two Olympian goddesses, Aphrodite and Artemis. As a mirror handle, the figure may simply evoke the powers of Aphrodite, goddess of love and beauty; alternatively, she might be connected with Artemis Orthia, whose cult was important at the Laconian city of Sparta.
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Artwork Details
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Title:Bronze mirror with a support in the form of a nude girl
Period:Archaic
Date:2nd half of the 6th century BCE
Culture:Greek, Laconian
Medium:Bronze
Dimensions:H. 13 5/16 in. (33.8 m)
Classification:Bronzes
Credit Line:Fletcher Fund, 1938
Accession Number:38.11.3
Said to be from southern Italy
Richter, Gisela M. A. 1938. "An Archaic Greek Mirror." Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 33(5): pp. 130–33, figs. 1–2.
Richter, Gisela M. A. 1953. Handbook of the Greek Collection. pp. 33, 182, pl. 22a, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Robertson, Martin and Cambridge University Press. 1975. A History of Greek Art, Vols. 1 and 2. p. 640 n. 147, Cambridge, England.
Pasquier, Alain. 1982. "Deux objets laconiens méconnus au Musée du Louvre." Bulletin de Correspondance Hellénique, 106(1). p. 302 n. 77.
Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae (LIMC). 1984. Vol. 2: Aphrodisias-Athena. "Aphrodite," p. 48, no. 375, pl. 35, Zürich: Artemis Verlag.
Mertens, Joan R. 1985. "Greek Bronzes in the Metropolitan Museum of Art." Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 43(2): no. 12, pp. 23–25, 44.
Kozloff, Arielle and David Gordon Mitten. 1988. The Gods Delight : The Human Figure in Classical Bronze no. 6, pp. 69–74, Ohio: Cleveland Museum of Art.
Picón, Carlos A. 2002. "Sculptural Styles of Magna Graecia." Magna Graecia: Greek Art from South Italy and Sicily, Mr. Michael Bennett, Dr. Aaron Paul, and Mario Iozzo, eds. p. 76, fig. 8, Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art.
Picón, Carlos A. 2007. Art of the Classical World in the Metropolitan Museum of Art: Greece, Cyprus, Etruria, Rome no. 48, pp. 60, 417, New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Hemingway, Seán. 2021. How to Read Greek Sculpture. pp. 26–27, fig. 12, New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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The Museum's collection of Greek and Roman art comprises more than 30,000 works ranging in date from the Neolithic period to the time of the Roman emperor Constantine's conversion to Christianity in A.D. 312.