The single leaf or heart-shaped fan occurs constantly in Greek terra-cottas; a number of examples are to be seen in the British and other Museums. In the Victoria and Albert Museum is a charming little winged Amor, draped, tripping gaily along, hiding his face behind a fan of this shape. Blondel refers to a female figure in the Louvre, seated at a feast, holding a leaf-fan; also in a fresco at Pompeii a figure is seen holding a fan which this author mistakes for that of a different shape, but which is really a perspective view of the plantain-leaf. We see the triform leaf-fan in the hands of a Tanagra figure in the collection of Louis Fould, illustrated in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts for 1860; this, as well as a number of Tanagra figures, evidently representing priestesses of Venus. It is impossible to determine with any degree of accuracy the material and construction of these fans: in some instances they are evidently stretched on a frame, and adorned with ornament either painted or embroidered; occasionally, also, the decorative motif is that of the natural veining of the leaf; the handles being usually very short, in many cases scarcely visible. The slight vestiges of colour remaining on these statuettes must in no instance be taken as suggesting the colouring of the original fans. The business of the Tanagra sculptor was to make a statuette and not a portrait of any particular fan; the colouring of the fan of the statuette would therefore be determined by the general colour scheme of which it formed a part.
The circular fan of peacocks’ feathers appears as early as the fifth century B.C., and even at this date had already been used in Asia Minor.
References to the feather-fan are of constant occurrence in the writings of Greek authors. A slave in the Orestes of Euripides exclaims: ‘After the Phrygian fashion I chanced with the close circle of feathers to be fanning the gale, that sported in the ringlets of Helen.’
Instances of the feather-fan are common on Greek vases,—on the Campanian Hydra (F. 212), British Museum, the shape in this instance being that of the reversed heart. In the fourth vase room, on an oil-flask, with Aphrodite seated in the lap of Adonis, a figure appears holding a very large fan, but similar in shape to the first mentioned; and on the Apulian Hydra, F. 352, a fan appears which is evidently a conventional representation of the peacock feather-fan. The long-handled fan was also adopted by the Greeks, these being waved by servants or attendants, as in Egypt.
The Etruscans, amongst whom the luxury of the fan is early seen, and who transmitted it later to the Romans, used the peacock feathers, of
FROM AN APULIAN HYDRA.
(British Museum.) different lengths, in a semicircle: such a fan appears on a large vase in the Louvre.
On an Etruscan crater, representing Heracles strangling the serpents, surrounded by the greater gods, a fan of plain feathers is held in the hand of one of the attendants. On a sarcophagus at Vulci, found in the winter of 1845-6, a female figure appears waving a large fan, ῥιπίς, identical in shape with fans used in India at the present day. In the Grotta del Sole e della Luna (tomb of the Sun and Moon) at Vulci, discovered in 1830, one of the ceilings has a singular fan-pattern, given in Mon. Ined. Inst., i. tav. xli., the counterpart of which is found in two tombs at Cervetri, whence we may conclude it was no uncommon decoration in Etruscan houses.[24]
In the Museo Gregorio, Rome, are half-a-dozen handles of fans, with holes for threads or wire, to tie in feathers or leaves.
