This September, the Harvard Art Museums present Animal-Shaped Vessels from the Ancient World: Feasting with Gods, Heroes, and Kings; the exhibition brings together 75 objects—elaborate drinking and pouring vessels as well as related contextual works—from the collections of the Harvard Art Museums and nearly two dozen international lenders. Offering a glimpse into the symbolism and communal practices that found expression at ancient feasts across the ancient Near East and Mediterranean, the exhibition and its accompanying print publication, online digital feature, and rich programming explore the importance of feasting as a social and ritual activity, as a showplace for the effects of cross-cultural exchange, and as a driving force behind artistic creativity.

While the songs, speeches, and prayers that enlivened ancient feasts are now largely lost to us, many drinking and serving vessels—a surprising number of them in the shape of animals—have survived. Taking animal-shaped vessels as performative props in the multifaceted world of feasting, the exhibition not only introduces the social and ceremonial functions of these ritual occasions, but also highlights the essential and universal role played by food and drink—and by the highly imaginative containers used to consume them.

Animal-Shaped Vessels is on display in the Harvard Art Museums’ Special Exhibitions Gallery from September 7, 2018 through January 6, 2019; it is curated by Susanne Ebbinghaus, the George M.A. Hanfmann Curator of Ancient Art and head of the Division of Asian and Mediterranean Art. The exhibition will be shown exclusively at the Harvard Art Museums.

The accompanying catalogue, edited by Ebbinghaus, is the first comprehensive and cross-disciplinary look at these unique vessels and includes contributions by an international group of scholars. A beautifully designed hardcover volume, the catalogue is published by the Harvard Art Museums and distributed by Yale University Press. Details available at http://bit.ly/2Ltu7MY.

An online digital feature hosted on the museums’ website at harvardartmuseums.org/tools will provide visitors with expanded multimedia content on the history of feasting and drinking practices in the ancient world, as well as further details on the material history of these one-of-a-kind vessels.

A sketchbook produced in conjunction with the exhibition will be available for free at the museums’ admissions desk for all families and young visitors. It contains prompts for exploring the show, suggestions for close looking, and sketching exercises to encourage visitors’ creativity in designing animal-shaped vessels of their own.

Major backing for the Animal-Shaped Vessels exhibition came in the form of a $325,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), which supports the presentation of the exhibition, the expense of bringing the objects from international lenders, a robust range of public programs (lectures, workshops, and tours), and the production of the digital feature. Read more about the grant here: http://bit.ly/2AXl71I. In recognition of the generous grant from the NEH, the museums are offering free admission to all visitors on Wednesday afternoons, 1–5pm, and on the first Saturday of each month, 10am–5pm, throughout the run of the show.

“It is fitting that these varied and well-traveled vessels are intersecting for exhibition at the Harvard Art Museums, a crossroads for works of art from around the globe, from ancient to modern times, all under one roof,” said Martha Tedeschi, the Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director of the Harvard Art Museums. “By illuminating the history and making of these remarkably global objects, we invite our guests to raise a glass to what unites us across culture and time.”

Ebbinghaus added: “I am excited about this unique opportunity to unite such a large selection of animal-shaped vessels from more than 20 museums in both the United States and abroad.” The exhibition grew out of Ebbinghaus’s longtime research interests. “Most of these vessels are old friends to me, but I have never seen them together,” she said. “As a group, they allow us to discern similarities and differences in artistic forms, and as witnesses to ancient feasts in many different cultures, from Greece to China, they give us a glimpse into a variety of feasting traditions.”

The Installation
The exhibition includes vessels in the shape of standing or reclining animals, animal-headed cups and beakers, drinking horns, and animated pitchers. Various creatures, real and imagined, give these drinking and pouring vessels their lifelike forms: powerful bulls and rams, majestic lions and mythical griffins, wild boars and braying donkeys, graceful birds and playful monkeys, among others. Assembling such a range of vessels for the first time, the exhibition presents a cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary examination of how they spanned geography and time, across three continents and over three millennia. The international menagerie of drinking and pouring vessels vividly illustrates not just how shapes and artistic forms crossed borders and epochs, but how ideas as well were exchanged among cultures—tangible evidence of close contact and the intermingling of traditions.

Beyond their role in ritual and ceremonial drinking, animal-shaped vessels functioned variously as diplomatic gifts and tribute, the spoils of war, offerings to deities and the dead, and exotic objects of trade; they also were prized and emulated as symbols of status and prestige. Each object in the exhibition is a compelling animal study in itself, with a wealth of information embedded in its material, shape, and decoration. Many were made of rare or innovative materials—including gold, silver, bronze, glass, faience, and horn—and at the hands of skilled artists. They conveyed important information about their liquid contents and the nature of a gathering, but were also markers of social stature, identity, etiquette, and shared values.

Most of the objects in the exhibition belong to a tradition of animal-shaped drinking and pouring vessels that persisted in the Near East and the Mediterranean from the Bronze Age in the third and second millennia BCE to the advent of Islam in the seventh century; this tradition eventually extended all the way to China, via the Silk Road. Select animal-shaped vessels from other cultures and periods—including East Asia, Africa, Europe, and South America—provide further points of comparison, including the most recent work in the exhibition, a drinking horn sent to U.S. President John F. Kennedy from Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev on the eve of the Cuban Missile Crisis in September 1962. The horn is on loan from the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. In addition to the animal-shaped vessels, the installation also features several related objects (pottery, paintings, reliefs, bronzes, and a mosaic) with ancient and modern representations of feasts, including Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s painting The Women of Amphissa (1887), on loan from the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute. A ram head mug shown in the painting is based on a fifth-century BCEvessel in the collection of the British Museum, which also is included in the exhibition. The two works are being shown together for the first time.

More than 20 domestic and international institutions have generously lent objects to the exhibition, including the Ashmolean Museum (Oxford University), the British Museum (London), the Louvre (Paris), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), and the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston).

Learn more and view a slideshow of objects at harvardartmuseums.org/animalshapedvessels. The museums invite visitors to use #partyanimals and #HarvardArtMuseums to tag their posts on social platforms.