Bronze Group: Man Holding a Woman
Unknown · Undated in the museum record; probably Bronze Age
A small, flat bronze group under ten centimetres high, showing a man holding a woman who, in the museum's words, seems to emerge from his thigh. The figures are simplified to the point of abstraction, with thin bodies, schematic limbs and faces reduced to a few features. Look at how the two bodies are joined and at the flatness of the casting, which was made to be seen from the front. The museum compares its style to the flat statuettes found in the Orontes valley of western Syria, a well-known group of early metal figures.
The group came from Syria, without a recorded site, and the Louvre purchased it in nineteen oh two. The record gives no date, but the flat Orontes-type figurines it resembles belong to the Bronze Age, in the third and second millennia BC. The subject is unusual and hard to explain: a birth, an embrace, or a myth we no longer know. Early Syrian metalworkers produced many small cast figures of gods, warriors and women for shrines and offerings, and this two-figure composition stands out among them for its ambition.
Did You Know? The museum's own description says the woman seems to come out of the man's thigh, a scene no myth has yet explained.
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