Mosaic Fragment with Man Leading a Giraffe

5th century

Byzantine; Syria or Lebanon

This mosaic fragment was once part of a larger composition that paved the floor of a wealthy family villa in the Eastern Mediterranean. Composed of thousands of small tesserae, or stone cubes, it shows a giraffe and a human handler standing against a decorative backdrop of scallop-shaped semicircles. No doubt originally set amid a profusion of other wild and exotic animals, giraffes such as this one captivated the imagination of those who saw them in parades and public games. Writing around the turn of the third century, the historian Cassius Dio (about A.D. 150–235), among others, called this marvelous creature a Camelopardus because, in his opinion, the giraffe combined the physical traits of both the camel and the leopard.

Status: On View, Gallery 153
Department: Arts of the Ancient Mediterranean and Byzantium

Culture: Byzantine
Title: Mosaic Fragment with Man Leading a Giraffe
Place: Tyre (Object made in)
Date Dates are not always precisely known, but the Art Institute strives to present this information as consistently and legibly as possible. Dates may be represented as a range that spans decades, centuries, dynasties, or periods and may include qualifiers such as c. (circa) or BCE.: 401 CE–500 CE
Medium: Stone in mortar
Dimensions: 170.8 × 167 × 6.4 cm (67 1/4 × 65 3/4 × 2 1/2 in.)
Credit Line: Gift of Mrs. Robert B. Mayer
Reference Number: 1993.345
IIIF Manifest The International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) represents a set of open standards that enables rich access to digital media from libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural institutions around the world. Learn more.: https://api.artic.edu/api/v1/artworks/126436/manifest.json

“Raff, Katharine A. 2022. “”The Waiting-Servant Motif in a Late Antique Textile in Chicago: Iconography, Visuality, and Materiality”” Arts 11, no. 3: 64. https://doi.org/10.3390/arts11030064. Fig. 15.
Nancy Ševčenko, “”The Giraffe that Came to Constantinople,”” The Eloquence of Art: Essays in Honour of Henry Maguire, edited by Andrea Olsen Lam, and Rossitza Schroeder, Taylor & Francis Group, 2020, pp. 336-337, fig. 19.1.
Alexabdra van der Greer, Animals in Stone: Indian Mammals Sculptured Through Time (Leiden: Brill, 2008) pp. 281, fig. 350.
Edgar Williams, Giraffe (London: Reaktion Books Ltd., 2010) p. 53 (ill.)
“”CLEOPATRA; THE ANCIENT WORLD,”” Computer program, 1997, The Art Institute of Chicago.”

Art Institute of Chicago, Of Gods and Glamour: The Mary and Michael Jaharis Galleries of Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Art, Gallery 153, November 11, 2012 - present.

Said to be from North Syria or Lebanon, possibly Tyre. Asfar Bros., Beirut, Lebanon, by 1968; sold to Mr. and Mrs. Robert B. Mayer, Winnetka, IL, 1968 [according to correspondence in curatorial file];on loan to the Art Institute from 1972-1993; given to the Art Insititute of Chicago in 1993.

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