Hypnos

cults3d

Life is a bitch and Death is her sister, Sleep is their cousin, what a fuckin' family picture. —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 sleep. In 1909, when he was on his way back from a tour of Syria, T. E. Lawrence ("Lawrence of Arabia") passed through Naples and wrote a friend "The bronzes in the Naples museum are beyond words." He paid a Neapolitan bronze foundry eight francs for a flawed freehand copy of the Hypnos head now in the British Museum. Lawrence loved his Hypnos copy, writing "nothing, not even the dawn--can disturb me in my curtains: only the slow crumblings of the coals in the fire: they get so red & throw such splendid glimmerings on the Hypnos." Elsewhere he wrote "I would rather possess a fine piece of sculpture than anything in the world." There's no record of what happened to Lawrence's Hypnos copy, 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 copy of my own.