THREE GRAECO-ROMAN BRONZE FEET ATTACHMENTS

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THE ART OF ANCIENT CYPRUS THE DESMOND MORRIS COLLECTION Desmond Morris is the author of The Naked Ape, Manwatching, The Naked Eye and numerous other books on human behaviour, as well as being a professional Zoologist, Surrealist artist, Lecturer and Broadcaster. He began his collection of Ancient Cypriot art after a memorable visit to Cyprus. In his own words: "It started the moment I walked into Room Two of the Cyprus Museum in Nicosia and for the first time set eyes on the amazing objects produced 4,000 years ago by the Bronze Age inhabitants of the island. There I found vessels and figurines exuding a cheerful inventiveness of such warmth and intensity that I became immediately infatuated. The rich playfulness of the Bronze Age Cypriot artists, their bold self-confidence in experimenting with novel shapes, their exuberant sense of sculptural humour and their imaginative verve in developing highly stylised forms were a revelation". On his return to England he visited the salerooms and dealers, first in London and then New York, Boston, Amsterdam and Paris. Beginning with his first purchase in 1967, he went on to amass a collection of over 1,100 mainly pottery objects during the next nine years, the wealth of his collection lying in the Early Bronze Age material, probably the finest collection outside Cyprus. Many of these objects can be traced back to the 19th Century collections of Lawrence and Luigi Palma di Cesnola which subsequently were acquired by Lt. Gen. A.H.L.F. Pitt-Rivers and were displayed in the Pitt-Rivers Museum, Farnham, Dorset. Desmond Morris's friend, Prof. Vassos Karageorghis, then director of the Department of Antiquities of the Republic of Cyprus, encouraged him to publish his collection and make it available to scholars and students. Both of these duties Desmond Morris discharged generously and admirably, culminating in the publication in Oxford in 1985 of The Art of Ancient Cyprus, a seminal archaeo-aesthetic work on the culture of this seductive island, illustrating it with his own line drawings and photographs. The launch of the book, which coincided with an exhibition of some of his major objects at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (April-May 1985), introduced by Prof. Vassos Karageorghis, revealed the beauty and humour of this cross-cultural civilisation influenced by Egypt, the Levant and the Mediterranean world. As Desmond Morris writes in the Preface: "While I was assembling the collection it became clear to me that I had a duty to make it accessible to archaeologists. It is indefensible for private collectors to keep ancient artefacts if they are not prepared to make them available for examination by serious scholars". Numerous students and scholars have been welcomed to his beautiful home in North Oxford where they have benefited from having access to and handling his comprehensive collection, arranged as a museum display according to chronology, pottery ware and typology. Many of the objects in the Morris collection can be paralleled with those in the Cesnola Collection, recently rearranged and published by Vassos Karageorghis (Ancient Art from Cyprus: The Cesnola Collection in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2000) and in the Severis Collection (V. Karageorghis, Ancient Cypriote Art in the Severis Collection, Athens, 1999). These two catalogues have detailed tables of the latest Cypriot chronology. However, for the purposes of this catalogue, we have adhered to Desmond Morris's dating terminology. Desmond Morris had always hoped that a museum or institution would be able to give a permanent home to his entire collection, but that has not been forthcoming. Now he feels the time has come to dispose of his collection in a way that new collectors and museums, fired by a similar passion, will be able to enhance their own collections in a dynamic way by the acquisition of individual works of art. A retrospective exhibition of Desmond Morris's Surrealist paintings and the publication of a catalogue raisonné are planned for later this year in Belgium.

THREE GRAECO-ROMAN BRONZE FEET ATTACHMENTS

CIRCA 1ST CENTURY A.D.

Details

THREE GRAECO-ROMAN BRONZE FEET ATTACHMENTS
CIRCA 1ST CENTURY A.D.
Each in the form of a sandaled foot, finely detailed with the toe nails delineated, a raised boss under each foot, a collared terminal above the ankle, pierced for attachment
3 3/8 in. (8.5 cm.) long av. (3)

Special notice

No VAT will be charged on the hammer price, but VAT at 17.5% will be added to the buyer's premium which is invoiced on a VAT inclusive basis.

Lot Essay

PUBLISHED:
D. Morris, The Art of Ancient Cyprus, Oxford, 1985, p. 359, reference nos. DM-ME-45, 46 and 47.

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