Head of a Sphinx (540–520 BCE): Art, History and Details

Head of a Sphinx (540–520 BCE) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

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.

Object facts

• Title: Head of a Sphinx
• Date: 540–520 BCE
• Culture: Greece, Archaic period
• Type: Sculpture
• Technique: marble
• Dimensions: Overall: 27 x 20.5 x 26.3 cm (10 5/8 x 8 1/16 x 10 3/8 in.)
• Collection: GR - Greek
• Department: Greek and Roman Art
• Accession number: 1928.858

A detail from the museum

Greek sphinxes were often placed on top of columns or grave stelai as guardian figures.

Collection credit

Gift of the John Huntington Art and Polytechnic Trust

Further reading listed by the museum

• R. H. “Art of the Early Greeks.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 15, no. 10 (1928): 191–193.
• Bieber, Margarete. "Greek Sculpture in the Cleveland Museum of Art." Art in America Vol. XXXI, Issue 3, July, 1943: 112-126.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. The Cleveland Museum of Art Handbook. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1958.

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.