An appliqué in the shape of a stag, fashioned from a single piece of thick, hammered gold. The stag is captured mid-movement, with its legs drawn up beneath its body. The slender curved neck is extended to tilt the head upwards, granting the stag a proud demeanour. Prominent antlers rise from the crown of the head, extending towards the stag’s rump in an intricate arrangement of cascading curlicues. Additional detail has been added to suggest the texture of the stag’s coat, with small incised lines along the tail, brow, ruff, and above the hooves. The facial features are also picked out in relief. The reverse of the stag features three small hoops, attached with a goldcopper alloy, that would have been used to affix the appliqué to clothing or a shield, allowing it to be worn by its wealthy Scythian owner. Altogether, this is a fine example of the ‘Animal Style’ art of the Eurasian Steppe in the first millennium BC.

Appliqués such as this were produced in the Caucasus region, from the late second millennium B.C. onwards. Highly stylised animals with small waists and arched necks and backs were the core motif of this style, and feature on a range of objects, including buckles, axes and pins. Examples have been found in Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and the Northern Caucasus, dating from the beginning of the Late Bronze and Early Iron ages. Cast bronze belt clasps have been excavated in the Republic of Georgia, and are one of the region’s distinct cultural outputs in the first few centuries AD. The openwork patterns may imitate thin plaques of gold and silver, which were decorated with twisted wire and filigree, and would have been nailed at the corners to wood and leather backings.

Published

Antiquities, Christie’s, 5 July 2023, Lot 64.
David Aaron, IX, 2026, no. 4, pp. 11-14.

Provenance

With Aaron Gallery, Tehran, by at least 1965.
With Jerome M. Eisenberg (1930-2022), Royal Athena Gallery, New York, acquired from the above on 15 February 1965.
With Nasli M. Heeramaneck (1902-1971), New York.
Private Collection of Jay C. Leff (1925-2000), Uniontown, Pennsylvania.
With Jerome M. Eisenberg (1930-2022), Royal Athena Gallery, New York, acquired from the above, database number LJ01. Private Collection of Louis and Hilaire Beck (d. 2018), 2084 Fifth Avenue, New York, acquired from the above on 21 April 1982, inventory number 1855.
Thence by descent to their daughter, Kathy Beck, New York.
Sold at: Antiquities, Christie’s, 5 July 2023, Lot 64, for £100,800. ALR: S00272231, with IADAA Certificate, this item has been checked against the Interpol database.
Accompanied by metallurgical analysis by Dr. Jack Ogden, Striptwist Ltd.

Note on the Provenance

Nasli M. Heeramaneck (1902-1971) was a dealer and collector of Iranian, Central Asian, and European antiquities. The son of an art dealer in Bombay, Heeramaneck entered his father’s business and operated galleries in London and Paris. Heeramaneck lived in Paris from at least 1927 into the 1930s. He developed a large collection of Luristan bronzes by the early 1930s, and had already sold one of these to the British Museum by 1924. He moved to New York and continued to develop his collection over the next fifty years or so. His wife, Alice Heeramaneck (19101993), described that his process was to ‘buy five, sell four and keep the best for himself’.1 In this way, his keen eye and expertise ensured that he developed a highquality list of clients, primarily museums and major collectors.

Heeramaneck kept his personal collection close: ‘I collected the works of art and enjoyed them. They were not for sale. I kept them together, knowing that some day they’d be in a museum’.2 Now, many of his works are in museum collections. In 1966, Heeramaneck donated a major collection of Pre-Columbian art to New Delhi’s National Museum, including around 200 pieces of pottery, stoneware, textiles and gold from Mayan and South American cultures. Heeramaneck said he wanted to give back to India, as it was the source for many of the other works in his collection. In 1969, the Los Angeles County Museum acquired his collection of Indian, Nepalese, and Tibetan artworks, encompassing works from antiquity to the eighteenth century. This was valued at the time to be worth about $2.5 million, and was used to establish a study centre for Asian art at the museum. After Heeramaneck’s death, the museum acquired further pieces from his collection, alongside some of Alice Heeramaneck’s own collection, in 1976. Alice served as an honorary trustee of the museum.

Former president of the Fayette Bank and Trust Company of Uniontown, Pennsylvania, Jay Calvin Leff (1925-2000) amassed an extensive art collection between the 1950s and the 1970s. He collected a wide range of works, including African, Oceanic, PreColumbian Arts, and Antiquities. Over 800 objects from his collection, including the silver zebu, were exhibited at the Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, in 1959. Leff hoped this exhibition would encourage people to ‘charge brazenly into the art world’ and encourage respect for the cultures dismissed under the term ‘primitive’.3 Artworks from his collection were also famously exhibited at the Museum of Primitive Art, New York (1964), the American Federation of Arts, New York (1965), the American Museum of Natural History, New York (1965), and the Brooklyn Museum, New York (1966-67).

Leff amassed a collection of about 2,000 artworks, many of which are now in the permanent collections of American institutions.

Stag Appliqué