DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.1021#0352
the seated figure stands a fourth, apparently plucking fruit
from the tree. The left-hand margin is filled up Painted
with six lion-heads. Alongside of this remark- teblet
able composition of the goldsmith we must place another
of the painter, which seems to offer a key to its interpreta-
tion. On a stucco plaque on a blue ground the painter
has limned in yellow and white the scene reproduced in
Plate XI. The centre is occupied by a figure, precisely
like the armed one of the signet, with an altar (of the form
known to us in the lion-relief), and beyond this a woman
who approaches with outstretched hands. On the left of
the central figure appears a second woman, doubtless in the
same attitude, although the painting is so far effaced that
only the head and bust are now distinguishable.
Here, we have unquestionably a worship-scene: of ador-
ant and altar there can be no doubt, and in the armed
figure we must recognize a symbol of deity. If that be its
function here, it must be the same on the signet: we have
to do with one and the same deity on both. And in the
great shield and brandished spear we recognize two essential
attributes of Zeus himself, — the aegis and the thunder-
bolt.1
If we are right in taking this armed figure for Zeus, then
the seated woman of the signet must be Earth in one of
her manifold personifications, as Dione or Demeter, and the
flower-bearers either her worshipers or attendant nymphs.
We should then have in this ring-design a picture of the
world, — the sky with the sun and moon ; Zeus, who gath-
1 Ernest Gardner takes the armed figure of the signet, and others like it,
for Palladia. " They are to be regarded as conventional and abridged repre-
sentations [derived from shields] of an armed divinity. To eall them Palladia
is the simplest way of expressing the fact, whether it be true or not that those
who made them identified this armed divinity as the goddess whom we know
as the Pallas Athene of later Greece." — Journ. of Hellenic Studies, xii. 24.
from the tree. The left-hand margin is filled up Painted
with six lion-heads. Alongside of this remark- teblet
able composition of the goldsmith we must place another
of the painter, which seems to offer a key to its interpreta-
tion. On a stucco plaque on a blue ground the painter
has limned in yellow and white the scene reproduced in
Plate XI. The centre is occupied by a figure, precisely
like the armed one of the signet, with an altar (of the form
known to us in the lion-relief), and beyond this a woman
who approaches with outstretched hands. On the left of
the central figure appears a second woman, doubtless in the
same attitude, although the painting is so far effaced that
only the head and bust are now distinguishable.
Here, we have unquestionably a worship-scene: of ador-
ant and altar there can be no doubt, and in the armed
figure we must recognize a symbol of deity. If that be its
function here, it must be the same on the signet: we have
to do with one and the same deity on both. And in the
great shield and brandished spear we recognize two essential
attributes of Zeus himself, — the aegis and the thunder-
bolt.1
If we are right in taking this armed figure for Zeus, then
the seated woman of the signet must be Earth in one of
her manifold personifications, as Dione or Demeter, and the
flower-bearers either her worshipers or attendant nymphs.
We should then have in this ring-design a picture of the
world, — the sky with the sun and moon ; Zeus, who gath-
1 Ernest Gardner takes the armed figure of the signet, and others like it,
for Palladia. " They are to be regarded as conventional and abridged repre-
sentations [derived from shields] of an armed divinity. To eall them Palladia
is the simplest way of expressing the fact, whether it be true or not that those
who made them identified this armed divinity as the goddess whom we know
as the Pallas Athene of later Greece." — Journ. of Hellenic Studies, xii. 24.