This elegant piece was part of Leo Mildenberg collection of ancient animals. He began collecting animals during the 1950s when he joined the Bank Leu in Zurich; within a few years he had set up a specialist numismatic department which later became the leading auction house in the world of the ancient coins. By the 1970s the collection has grown into a veritable zoo and, in 1981, Leo Mildenberg held his first public exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Art. From the collection travelled extensively throughout the United States, Israel and Europe - fourteen cities across three continents. This piece was produced in Bactria and comes from the early first-millenium artistic tradition of the Luristan tribes of the Iranian mountains, whose life, style and their talent for metalwork are paralleled later in the first millennium by the Thracians and the Scythians who roamed from Bulgaria to Northern Iran, to the Caucasus, to the Steppes. The Luristan artists represented a culture that lived close to and with its animals. Its art abstracted the animal form into decorative devices that laid the foundations for the later "animal style" art of the Thracians, Bactrians and Scythians.
The stag and the ibex were two of the major Luristan heraldic symbols. Perhaps it was the elusiveness of these creatures that appealed to these tribal folk. Repeated attempts to breed deer and antelopes in captivity both in Mesopotamia and Egypt has failed. Yet these animals proliferated in the wild. Undoubtedly, this quality was attractive to the freedom-loving people not only for their own sake but also for the sake of herds of horses which were their livelihood. Certainly, the forms for the wild animals were intended to act magically on behalf of the domesticated horses to ensure their own proliferation as if in the wild.
Bibliography: Animals in the Ancient Art from the Leo Mildenberg Collection, ed. Arielle Kozloff, Indiana University Press, 1990