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Published: Murray Eiland, ‘Materials and Manufacture’ in Mougins Museum of Classical Art, catalogue, p. 178, fig. 53.
Exhibited: Musée d’Art Classique de Mougins (Mougins Museum of Classical Art), June 2011–August 2023, inventory number MMoCA.47.
Decorated in relief, the long rectangular sides with a band of laurel leaves and a frieze divided into six panels by Corinthian columns, alternately showing dolphins with a central Medusa mask and laurel leaves with a central seated sphinx, a border of scrolling vines below. The arched end panels similarly decorated, one with a temple facade formed by four Corinthian columns, a vase between the outermost columns issuing foliate tendrils spiraling upwards, and a pediment above bordered by laurel leaves, with ivy leaves at the terminals and a central roundel enclosing a Medusa mask; the other with an eight-armed cross formed by four twisted rods terminating in ivy leaves and centered by a roundel enclosing a Medusa mask.
Provenance: Collection of Graham Geddes, Melbourne, Australia, acquired from Sotheby's London in the early 1980s. Bonhams London, 15 October 2008, lot 102, sold for GBP 9,600 or approx. EUR 18,500 (converted and adjusted for inflation at the time of writing). The private collection of Christian Levett, France, acquired from the above and from thereon permanently exhibited in the Musée d’Art Classique de Mougins, the Museum of Classical Art in Mougins, France. Graham Geddes is an Australian collector and dealer who has travelled the globe for over fifty years in search of the beautiful, the obscure, and the sublime. Driven by a passion for history, objects, and the inexorable thrill of acquisition, Geddes assembled an impressive collection spanning from the Palaeolithic era to Late Antiquity, encompassing works from Mesopotamia to France and ranging from arrowheads to exquisitely crafted amphorae, all of them bearing witness to significant turning points in the development of ancient civilizations. Christian Levett (b. 1970) is a British commodities trader-turned-collector whose passion for collecting began in childhood. After building early collections of medals, art, and natural history books, he turned to antiquities in the early 2000s, quickly establishing himself as one of the most active private collectors in the field. In 2011, he founded the Musée d’Art Classique de Mougins (Mougins Museum of Classical Art) in southern France, where antiquities are exhibited in dialogue with works by modern and contemporary artists influenced by the classical tradition. Since retiring from commodities in 2016, Levett has devoted himself full-time to art and philanthropy, sponsoring academic scholarships and supporting archaeological excavations, including at Hadrian’s Villa in Tivoli.
Condition: Good condition with expected wear, manufacturing irregularities, areas of corrosion, signs of prolonged burial, obvious losses, old repairs, light warping.
The interior of the coffin is reinforced by a removable, custom-made acrylic glass support structure, commissioned by the Musée d’Art Classique de Mougins to museum conservation and safety standards. The structure provides substantial additional stability to the coffin and furthermore facilitates its safe handling and transportation. A comparable custom-made support system would likely cost approximately EUR 4,000–5,000 to have built today.
French Export License: Certificat d’exportation pour un bien culturel, no. 258289, dated 28 November 2025, has been granted. A copy accompanies this lot.
Weight: 127kg
Dimensions: Length 169.3 cm
Lead sarcophagi rank among the most distinctive and technically remarkable products of the funerary culture of the ancient Phoenician coast. Although produced in a number of centers, principally Tyre and Sidon, complete examples surviving with their original form substantially intact are exceptional. The inherent softness and weight of lead, combined with two millennia of burial, recovery, handling, and subsequent movement, left many surviving examples crushed, distorted, fragmented, or incomplete. The remarkable state of preservation of the present sarcophagus therefore gives a particularly rare impression of the monumental appearance these objects originally possessed.
Unlike stone sarcophagi, lead coffins were generally not conceived as permanently visible monuments. They formed the precious inner container of the burial, placed within a stone or wooden outer sarcophagus or inside a rock-cut tomb. Their elaborate decoration was thus created principally for the deceased and the funerary sphere rather than for public display.
The material itself was valuable and travelled considerable distances. Lead from major Mediterranean mining regions, including Iberia and Sardinia, was transported eastward and cast in large open molds. Before casting, relief-carved stamps were impressed into the mold to create the elaborate repertory of Greco-Roman and Phoenician imagery. Dionysiac, vegetal, architectural, and apotropaic motifs transformed an extraordinarily heavy sheet of cast metal into an elaborate funerary monument intended both to protect the body and to surround the deceased with images of protection, abundance, and regeneration.
Literature comparison:
Compare a closely related Phoenician lead sarcophagus, dated to the first half of the 1st millennium AD, 186 cm long, in the Musée du Louvre, inventory number AO 10227. Compare a closely related Roman lead sarcophagus, dated 3rd-4th century, 168.9 cm long, in the Walters Art Museum, accession number 55.85. Compare a closely related Phoenician lead coffin and lid, dated late 2nd-mid-3rd century, 175.3 cm long, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, object number 31.116a–I.
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