#molossian

[ironicallyantiquated]

The Jennings Dog is a Roman 2nd-century AD copy of a Hellenistic bronze statue depicting what is thought to be a Molossian hound, one of the best known antiquated breeds. Three individual sculptures are pictured above, the Jennings Dog itself, as well as a pair of marble hounds found at the Belvedere Court in the Vatican.

[londiniumlundene]

The Dogs of Alcibiades

The Bonner Gate of Victoria Park is guarded by two stone dogs – local legend has it that they were installed by a Lady Regnart in commemoration of a dog that saved someone from drowning in the nearby park lake. However, there are many more centuries of entwinning history and myth around these beasts.

The dog themselves are modelled after Molossian hounds, a now extinct breed from Northern Greece, and used by the Romans as fighting and guard dogs. The ancient Greeks made sculptures of the dogs, which the Romans then copied. One of these was found in a workshop in Rome in the 1750s by Henry Constantine Jennings, who took to referring to it as “a dog of Alcibiades”. He had noted the hound’s docked tail, which reminded him of a story of the slightly dodgy Athenian statesman Alcibiades. He was said to have owned a handsome dog whose tail he cut off to invoke pity from the Athenians, in doing so distract them from his worse deeds.

Such replica “Dogs of Alcibiades” soon became popular sculptures in the grounds of stately homes (the Jennings’s Dog spent many years at a mansion in Yorkshire before it was purchased by the British Museum), so a Lady choosing a pair as a gift to Victoria Park does not seem too unreasonable. These aren’t the 1912 originals that the Lady presented to the park though – those suffered from vandalism and were replaced with replicas in 2010. All in all, that would seem to make them replicas of replicas of a replica of the Greek original…

[6suicide6hermit6-blog]

my angel, Ares (13 months old)

[lamouchemorte]

Jennings Dog

2nd-century AD Roman copy of a Hellenistic bronze original