Our first Favorite Thing featured is the Scandinavian Ivory Dragon’s Head! The department’s Our Favorite Things series is a new post series highlighting our favorite objects from the Cleveland Museum of Art, where we get to learn every day. Our first object is from Cecily Hughes, a second-year PhD student studying under Elina Gertsman.
“This small, disembodied dragon’s head, carved from walrus ivory in Scandinavia or the British Isles during the 12th century, is so wonderfully strange that I fell in love with it at first sight!
“With slender fangs and bulbous eyes—wide-set and staring out over a short, deeply-wrinkled snout—this unprepossessing creature looks more like an anxious mole rat than a fierce reptile. And that intrigues me. Contemporaneous bestiaries paint dragons as terrifying serpents large enough to kill an elephant! But measuring only two and a half inches high, the CMA dragon head appears more feeble than fiendish. Why does it look so innocuous?”
