Mosaic with a Hunt: Lion, Pheasant and Dog
Unknown · c. 475-525 AD
A hound races across the panel, a lion leaps, and a pheasant with a long tail stands among the remains of flowers. The scene is probably a hunt, though the fragment is too small to show who is hunting whom. The animals are set on a pale ground and framed by a net pattern, and the mosaicist has given each creature a convincing movement, the dog stretched out at full speed and the lion coiled to spring. The panel is a little over a metre square; the upper right corner is a modern restoration and the whole was conserved in 2011.
Hunting scenes were among the most popular subjects for floors in the late Roman and early Byzantine East, decorating the reception rooms of wealthy houses in Syria at the turn of the fifth and sixth centuries. Panels like this one were often part of larger carpets of animals and plants. The Louvre bought the mosaic in 1971 together with the panel of gazelles displayed beside it, and both were made in Syria at roughly the same date, which makes them a useful pair for comparing workshop styles.
Did You Know? The mosaic was bought in the same year as its neighbour with the gazelles, and both are thought to come from Syria.
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