Brooklyn Museum — Egyptian, Classical, Ancient Near Eastern Art · statue

Head of a Bull

Source of record: Brooklyn Museum — Egyptian, Classical, Ancient Near Eastern Art — catalogued by the holding institution. View the original record →

Description

Caption: Head of a Bull, 2nd–3rd century C.E.. Terracotta, pigment, 3 1/16 x 1 3/4 x 1 9/16 in. (7.8 x 4.4 x 4 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Evangeline Wilbour Blashfield, Theodora Wilbour, and Victor Wilbour honoring the wishes of their mother, Charlotte Beebe Wilbour, as a memorial to their father, Charles Edwin Wilbour, 16.306. (Photo: Brooklyn Museum)

AI image analysis GPT-5.4-nano

Machine-generated from the object's image on Jul 2026. Not curatorial; treat deities, names, and signs below as the model's best reading, not authority.

A small, grey terracotta sculptural form shaped like the head of a bull with prominent curved horns and a stylized bovine face.

The image shows a single object photographed against a plain light background. The form is roughly hand-modeled and lacks fine detail: it has a bulbous forehead, a central muzzle with a shallow mouth/nose area, and two symmetrical horns curving outward and upward. The eyes are indicated by shallow recessed markings. The surface includes multiple incised or modeled lines around the muzzle and forehead, suggesting stylized facial features or attachment marks. No clearly legible hieroglyphs, cartouches, or alphabetic text are visible; only small, ambiguous incisions that do not resolve into specific signs. The object appears painted or coated in places, but the pigment is not clearly distinguishable in this monochrome photograph. Scale, restoration, and exact edges are unclear.

decorative Roman Period (per catalogue); exact dating from image unclear fragmentary
Materials Terracottapigment (unclear/possibly remaining coating)

Connections

Cross-references (2)

  • BKM-Accession 16.306 tier-2
  • BKM-Object 9564 tier-2
About this record's data
  • From the source institution — accession, description, dimensions, and dating are as catalogued by Brooklyn Museum — Egyptian, Classical, Ancient Near Eastern Art.
  • AI-inferred — the image-analysis panel (deities, names, signs) is machine-generated and may be wrong.
  • Approximate location — most map points are plotted at the site centroid, not the exact findspot.
  • Inferred links — cross-references marked with a match method other than explicit-source-field were matched by us, not stated by the source.