Cleveland Museum of Art

Head of a Sphinx

Date

540–520 BCE

Medium

marble

Culture

Greece, Archaic period

Department

Greek and Roman Art

Institution

Cleveland Museum of Art

This female head once belonged to a sphinx, a mythological hybrid creature with the head of a woman and body of a winged lion. Her short cylindrical crown, known as a polos, helps to identify her as a sphinx, as does the slope of her hair and neck, which once continued onto a feline body. Also common in ancient Egyptian and Near Eastern art (though more often in male form), the sphinx is best known in Greek mythology for devouring passersby who could not answer her riddle outside the Boiotian city of Thebes. Stone sphinxes like this one served as both votive offerings and grave monuments in Archaic Greece. Greek sphinxes were often placed on top of columns or grave stelai as guardian figures.

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