This catch-plate is remarkably thin and comes from an elaborately decorated one-piece fibula. The outward facing edge is precisely engraved with a pastoral scene of a horse and three wading birds. The horse is facing right, its body in profile, tail hanging almost at right angles and hindquarters touching the border. It has a large almond-shaped eye and a serpentine neck. Beneath the horse a bird turns its head and, between its front legs, touches the belly of the horse with its long pointed beak. Another bird stands on the horse’s back and looks over its shoulder towards the top left of the scene. The third bird is in front of the horse, as though running up the right hand border, the contours of its back echoing the line of the horse’s neck. Diagonally striped diamonds fill the voids. The reverse shows six fish each decorated with two lengths of zigzag, diagonally lined diamonds between their tail fins and triangles filling the spaces between their heads. Each side is framed by a border of semicircles and plain parallel lines. On the reverse are the remains of the fold which held the pin in place. The plate was originally square with a bowed upper edge. A fragment without restoration, chalk rubbed into the engraving in order to show the decoration more clearly.

Fibulae appeared in the Aegean around 13th-12th century BC following a change in fashion of women’s clothing, whereby the new peplos (a heavy garment made of wool) needed to be held in place with an aid. Such fine and complexly decorated fibulae as the present example transcended being merely a pin and were considered a piece of jewellery. These fibulae were created using the lost- wax method; a piece of metal was cold worked, one end hammered out into a lozenged-shaped catch-plate.

The birds, horse and fish stand for the three elements: air, land and sea. The composition of the opposing sides make a separation of the two primary temporal elements, land and water, symbolised by the horse and fish respectively. The birds represent the air and the heavens, and are the overarching link between land and water.

Provenance

Mr and Mrs S. Broukal, UK; acquired prior to 1956, thence by descent

Literature

See an example in the Museum of Cycladic Art, Athens, inventory number 0561, which could well have come from the same workshop, and an example at Harvard Museum which shows the same scene on the obverse, inventory number 1965.27

Compare also Oscar W. Muscarella, ‘Ancient Safety Pins’, Expedition Magazine, Volume 6, Issue 2 (Penn Museum, 1964), p.34