Bronze jug, ancient, Grand Tour souvenir or modern repro? origin?

Athena, Telemachus, Odysseus...?? It's really hard to tell features on this, but it might be a story progression of same character(s) as much as it may be a group of different ones.

 

I think the gray part of the bottom is a partial repair, but even it appears to have some age to it..

 

This is almost literally making my head spin. Do I count 3 figures heading out from each side of the handle, separated by a figure on a plinth, with a female figure sleeping/dead/unconscious leaning against the plinth on the right? I see no coherent narrative here & am less willing than Mirana is to assign identities. The variegated color makes picking out exact features difficult for me; I often have field/ground confusion.

After spending a while looking at vessels of this shape in different materials, I conclude that this does not look like anything ever used in reality. The bronzes do not have figural decoration and the terracottas, while figured, are not so overloaded with imagery. The palmette at the base of the handle is true to the type. This is more like something Josiah Wedgwood would have produced in jasper ware, a neoclassical fantasy.

 

I totally agree and it doesn't look terribly old to me either. I don't want to hazard a guess bc it could be from the 1980s home store. Def a decorative piece never used for utilitarian purposes.
Actually, I think you've described it very well, Bronwen.

 

Thank you. It's harder knowing what to make of something like this than of the genuine article.

 

The corrosion inside the neck looks more like roughly cast bronze to me.
I am as puzzled as the others, think it is a later piece with a repair to the base, but recommend you have it looked at by a museum or uni expert.

 

Thanks for your input everyone, very much appreciated!

 

Please do let us know what the verdict is if you do get an expert opinion. This one is really interesting.

 

I will, definitely!

 

I was hoping the multiple question marks and cyclops emoticon made it clear I was throwing a long guess lol.

 

Oh, I knew they were very tentative IDs, I'm just not ready to go even that far.

Except that it's wrong in every detail, the only part of the relief that rings any bells at all for me is just to the right of the plinth. The supine woman & the bemused/confounded man could be a scene together. The echo it sounds for me is the story of Achilles & Penthesilea. The Greek warrior Achilles kills Penthesilea, Queen of the Amazons before recognizing that he had been battling with a woman.

 

Having frequented museums and historic sites for years (as I still am doing as you can see from my avatar) I'd say the figures are not crisp enough. That happens when they take a plaster cast of a known antique and copy it for museum gift shops.

 

Could be! although if it is known I can't find the original or much similar.

 

Hi all. I finally got a response from an institution ( I tried contacting quite a few including the local university and others in Canada). This was my response from the wonderful Dr Paul Roberts, Ashmolean UK (https://www.ashmolean.org/people/paul-roberts):
"Dear Elen,

Thank you for these (great) photos.

Your jug is not an ancient piece but a (rather fine) piece made after the antique, probably in the 19th century.

It is entirely moulded unlike ancient bronze jugs, which usually have applied handles, bases etc.

The base (usually a raised ring foot) and the interior would be very neatly finished.

So not ancient, but a very nice piece.

Yours

Paul Roberts"

@Bronwen - since you were interested in any response on it from an institution

 

I have had very nice, helpful, replies from Oxford from time to time. Don't think they have ever ignored me altogether.

Thanks for sharing the outcome. His reply tells what the first things are to look for in such a case, which could be useful someday.

 

Definitely! The nice thing was, I sent to the general Ashmolean antiquities email at the same time as cc'ing Dr Roberts and they replied before he did to say that they were unfortunately too busy to answer this kind of email if it wasn't directly related to their collections. I got a reply from him a few days later