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This fearsome bronze hybrid, a mythical beast called a griffin, originally had a gaping bird’s beak, the ears of a donkey and the body—now missing—of a large cauldron. While a bird’s head and ass’s ears are common attributes of griffins, popular in Near Eastern art throughout the second and first millennia B.C., they were generally depicted with a lion’s body.

As the Greeks established trade contacts in the Levant and the Nile Delta during the early first millennium B.C., their sculptors began to create a new style of art by reworking standard eastern Mediterranean motifs, such as lotus blossoms, palmettes and composite creatures like sphinxes and griffins. Although these Greek artists invented neither griffin nor cauldron, they appear to have been the first to combine them. With ears erect, eyes wide and beak open, the Greek griffins often appear ready to attack, suggesting they served a protective function, recalling their role in Greek myth as the guardians of Apollo’s gold. (The knob on this griffin’s head is somewhat of a puzzle. It may represent a bird’s crest, as on a peacock.)

The historian Herodotus attests to the popularity of griffin cauldrons in cult worship: “The Samians … made therewith a bronze vessel, like an Argolic cauldron, with griffins’ heads projecting from the rim all round; this they set up in their temple of Hera” (Herodotus IV.152). Several vessels decorated with griffin heads have been discovered on the island of Samos, although this example, dating to the late seventh century B.C., likely comes from the Peloponnese, perhaps Corinth.

The griffin may be viewed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s newly restored Greek and Roman galleries.

This fearsome bronze hybrid, a mythical beast called a griffin, originally had a gaping bird’s beak, the ears of a donkey and the body—now missing—of a large cauldron. While a bird’s head and ass’s ears are common attributes of griffins, popular in Near Eastern art throughout the second and first millennia B.C., they were generally depicted with a lion’s body. As the Greeks established trade contacts in the Levant and the Nile Delta during the early first millennium B.C., their sculptors began to create a new style of art by reworking standard eastern Mediterranean motifs, such as lotus blossoms, […]