Rearing Horse

Once a part of an equestrian statue, this bronze horse was discovered in southwestern Arabia. The statue is a testament to the diffusion of Greco-Roman visual culture along the trade routes connecting the Mediterranean Sea with the Indian Ocean. A costly cast-bronze equestrian figure such as this may have depicted an imperial or other elite personage. There is also the possibility that it may have originally been one of a pair of statues of the Roman gods Castor and Pollux.

Provenance

• Said to have found been south of Sana’a, Yemen. Maurice Nahman (1868–1948), Cairo, until July 1930; purchased from Nahman by Brummer Gallery, Paris and New York (inventory P7095); purchased from Brummer by Mildred and Robert Woods Bliss, Washington, DC, February–March 1938; transferred to Harvard University, Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Byzantine Collection, Washington, DC, November 1940.

Selected Bibliography

• A. Jamme, “Inscriptions on the Sabaean Bronze Horse of the Dumbarton Oaks Collection,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 8 (1954): 317–30.
• G. M. A. Richter, Catalogue of Greek and Roman Antiquities in the Dumbarton Oaks Collection (Cambridge, MA, 1956), 26–28, no. 15, plate 10.
• B. Fowlkes-Childs and M. Seymour, The World between Empires: Art and Identity in the Ancient Middle East (New York, 2019), 30–31, no. 19.

Museum record