Hypnos

cults3d

Life is a harsh mistress and Death is her sibling,\nSleep is their cousin, what a terrible family portrait.\n—Lil Wayne, 6 Foot 7 Foot This is my laser scan of the Skulpturhalle Basel's cast of the British Museum's 1st-2nd century AD bronze head of Hypnos, the god of slumber. In 1909, when he was returning from a tour of Syria, T.E. Lawrence ("Lawrence of Arabia") passed through Naples and wrote to a friend "The bronzes in the Naples museum are indescribable." He paid an eight-franc fee to a Neapolitan bronze foundry for a flawed freehand copy of the Hypnos head now in the British Museum. Lawrence cherished his Hypnos replica, writing "nothing, not even dawn—can disturb me in my curtains: only the slow disintegration of the coals in the fire: they get so red & throw such magnificent glimmerings on the Hypnos." Elsewhere he wrote "I would rather possess a fine piece of sculpture than anything else in the world." There's no record of what happened to Lawrence's Hypnos replica, but a friend of mine has good reason to believe he owns it. So I've been in a friendly competition to get an interesting replica of my own.