UP, ‘Wow! Said the sphinx’ 23 oktober 1957
In 1953 (published in 1957), Sophia Loren is seated between two sphinx claws, the year she plays the starring role in ‘Two Nights with Cleopatra’, and after her breakthrough as the pharaonic Aïda. The sphinx as a throne is closely related to other feline-themed thrones, the earliest of which hails from 6000–5800 BCE: a votive terracotta statue, now in the beautiful Archaeological Museum, Ankara, shows a mother goddess giving birth, seated on a chair with two standing felines as arm rests. As the centuries pass, the panther’s arm rests are interchangeable with the lion and the sphinx.
But it is the last pharaoh of Egypt in western art who claims the sphinx throne more structurally, like when Cleopatra plays a starring role in Mankiewicz’s epic film Cleopatra (1963). When Liz Taylor enters Rome, the throne she rides in upon is a massively oversized sphinx. Not an Egyptian sphinx served as the prototype, however, but the sphinx that , possibly due to its undamaged features and popularity.
An intriguing press photo reveals a different angle. In 1955, the tap dancer and actress Ann Miller posed before the sphinx of Giza to promote the film ‘Hit the Deck in Cairo’: the well known, iconic Giza sphinx offers a clearly less dimensionally stable back-drop and, without a base, does not translate logically into a moveable throne.
The constellation “Cleopatra on the Sphinx” was so successful it was embraced by the world of advertising. An advertisement for Bols (Catch of the Week 7) reveals how, from 1930, serious American adverts directed at rational human beings attempted to elicit an emotional response.
United Press Associations, Wonder what the sphinx thinks?, New York 1955 Sun Times (1961)
