Capital with Addorsed Harpies (1200s): Art, History and Details

Capital with Addorsed Harpies (1200s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Monstrous images were prevalent in the decoration of religious buildings during the Middle Ages. Such images must have impressed, perhaps even terrified, the monks and visitors who spent much of their time within the cloister or church, a place of prayer, contemplation, and reflection. Scholars have speculated how such images would have been received by the people given the ubiquity of monsters in medieval society. The carved monsters, often symbolizing vice and retribution for sin, were possibly designed to provoke a range of emotional responses including laughter, wonder, surprise, fear, and shock. This striking imagery must have had a strong impact, which in turn led Saint Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153), the spiritual head of the Cistercian order, to admonish their use as distracting from prayer.

Object facts

• Title: Capital with Addorsed Harpies
• Date: 1200s
• Culture: Southwest France, Languedoc, Toulouse (?), 13th century
• Type: Sculpture
• Technique: limestone
• Dimensions: Overall: 23.5 x 28 x 23.2 cm (9 1/4 x 11 x 9 1/8 in.)
• Collection: MED - Romanesque
• Department: Medieval Art
• Accession number: 1916.1983

A detail from the museum

A harpy is part bird and part woman featured often in Greek mythology.

Collection credit

Gift of the John Huntington Art and Polytechnic Trust

Further reading listed by the museum

• Cahn, Walter, and Linda Seidel. Romanesque Sculpture in American Collections. New York: B. Franklin, 1978.
• Mikolic, Amanda. A Field Guide to Medieval Monsters.Cleveland; The Cleveland Museum of Art, 2019.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.