SOUTHERN ITALIAN, CIRCA 12TH CENTURY | MORTAR WITH AN EAGLE AND TWO DRINKING BIRDS

Decoration with birds, in particular eagles, is seen throughout Italian Romanesque sculpture. Compare the eagle on the present mortar, for example, with a Southern Italian 11th-century marble relief in the Cloisters Museum, New York (inv. no. 67.168). The eagle on the present object finds a strong parallel in two eagles, likewise with prominent feathers, on the late 11th-century Bishop's throne in the Duomo at Canosa (circa 1080-1089) (see Poeschke, op. cit., figs. 70 and 71). There is also a parallel with the interlaced animal decoration found on Venetian reliefs such as those which are recorded on the Fondaco dei Turchi in Venice by Ruskin in the 19th century (the building is now restored). Compare with the four decorative roundels described as Venetian, 12th-13th-century in the Cloisters (inv. nos. 09.152.9, .11, .12, .13). The ultimate source of such iconography in both the Southern Italian and Venetian examples can be found in Byzantine art. The present lot appears to have been conceived as a mortar, though it also finds precedents in Romanesque fonts and capitals due to its shape with enveloping decoration. 

RELATED LITERATURE

J. Poeschke, Die Skulptur des Mittelalters in Italien: Romanik, Munich, 1998, figs. 16, 70-71; L. Castelnuovo-Tedesco and J. Soultanian, Italian Medieval Sculpture in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Cloisters, New Haven and London, 2010, pp. 35, 110-113, nos. 8, 25