Sphinx

Description "Sphinx, dog of Hades, whom are you guarding, watching over the dead?"-funerary inscription from Thessaly. The role of the sphinx as a guardian spirit was often a funerary one. Like the griffins that adorned earlier cauldrons of the Orientalizing period, sphinxes such as this one served as "watchdogs" over the precious contents of bronze vessels, which sometimes held the cremated remains of the deceased.

Conservation

Date	Description	Narrative
9/01/1960	Treatment	cleaned; mounted
9/23/1960	Treatment	cleaned
9/23/1960	Treatment	stabilized
4/17/1962	Treatment	stabilized; other

Exhibitions

• Flight, Fantasy, Faith, Fact. Dayton Art Institute, Dayton. 1953-1954.

Provenance Lambros Collection [date and mode of acquisition unknown]; Jean P. Lambros and Giovanni Dattari Sale, Paris, June 17-19, 1912, lot 214 [said to be from Lokri]; Henry Walters, Baltimore, 1912, by purchase; Walters Art Museum, 1931, by bequest.

Credit Acquired by Henry Walters, 1912