Hypnos, god of sleep, pendant (restored wing)

This pendant is an extremely accurate 3D laser-scanned, 3D printed, and hand-cast reduction of the British Museum's first-or-second century AD bronze "Head of Hypnos," the Greek god of sleep. The original bronze is missing its left wing, but I have digitally restored it using the surviving wing as a template.

The piece’s vacant eyes, the surreal wings, locks of hair, and its ambiguous gender make for a remarkable artifact of other-worldliness which has spoken to people across time.

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 same bronze 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." Lawrence also 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 in 2013 I 3D laser-scanned a high fidelity cast of the original Hypnos head at the Skulpturhalle plaster cast museum in Basel, Switzerland. I’ve now prepared the resulting 3D data—the first of its kind—for 3D printing wax patterns which are then hand cast in a variety of precious and semi-precious metals in the traditional lost-wax casting method.

Now you can wear this timeless sculpture as a necklace, in a variety of materials.

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