Published Catalogue Text: Stone Sculptures: The Greek, Roman and Etruscan Collections of the Harvard University Art Museums , written 1990
147
Head from a Small Portrait, a Statue of a Woman, or a Small Statue of the Good Shepherd
The very crystalline marble is from Thasos or northwest Asia Minor. The strands of hair have been sharpened with an engraver's tool (in post-Classical times?).
The workmanship is cursory, with the features irregularly placed. The hair and the large eyes are indicated by incised lines, the latter protruding also. The mouth is wide and turned downward. Thick plaits of hair are wound around the top and back of the head, with no relation to its shape. These plaits of hair come together in a horizontal "V" leading to a vertical line down the middle of the back of the head.
A small statue of the Good Shepherd found in the ruins of Caesarea Maritima on the Palestinian coast gives a good illustration of how the complete figure from Daphne must have appeared. There is a second such figure, where the head is only in relief against the animal's back, from near Gaza (Vermeule, C., Anderson, 1981, p. 16, fig. 34).
As a head from a small statue of the Good Shepherd, this creation is the eastern Mediterranean successor to the first images of the youth with a ram or sheep around his shoulders. The first group came out of Hellenistic Asia Minor around A.D. 275 or somewhat earlier and gave the Bonus Pastor the idealized features of Alexander the Great. The sarcophagi of the period form A.D. 250 to 325 in Rome constitute the second group of representations of the Good Shepherd, and they include youths derived from the Alexander the Great image and those who look toward the round-faced, curly-headed types from Syrian Antioch and those from the Holy Land (Weitzmann, 1979, pp. 318-319, no. 463 and 62). When a Phrygian cap is worn, the Good Shepherd depends on the older iconography of Orpheus taming the beasts with music (Weitzmann, 1979, pp. 320-322, nos. 464-466).
An idea of when such "Little Orphan Annie" heads of the Good Shepherd can be dated comes from the hair and faces of the mahouts on the elephants in the diptych leaf of A.D. 431 in the British Museum, the scene depicting the consecration of a deceased emperor (Weitzmann, 1979, pp. 70-71, under no. 60). These small statues of the Good Shepherd were produced as table or shelf supports in Late Antiquity for tombs, chapels, and doubtless, household shrines, as pagan groups had been employed in earlier centuries (Ganymede and the Eagle, Bellerophon and Pegasos, etc.) (Frel, n.d., p. 38, no. V 83). There were other iconographic types used for the youthful Good Shepherd in the Latin West. A small statue found near the Aurelian Wall at the Porta San Paolo in Rome mixes the Alexander the Great ideal with third-century Greek Imperial portraiture in a head that stands forth from the sheep on his shoulder (Jones, 1912, p. 361, no. 1, pl. 93).
Cornelius Vermeule and Amy Brauer
