Published Catalogue Text: Stone Sculptures: The Greek, Roman and Etruscan Collections of the Harvard University Art Museums , written 1990
107
Small Head of a God or Youth
The nose is damaged, and there is a break through the middle of the neck. The cap (or the hair) behind curls around. The brow is smooth, suggesting this area may have been finished in paint.
This is a Severe Style head in miniature, from a small statue, perhaps of Hermes, with the petasos on his head and the wings attached where holes remain behind the ears. The fifth century B.C. antecedents of this head compare well with the so-called Strangford Apollo from Lemnos in the British Museum, about 485 B.C. (Vermeule, C., 1982, p. 223, fig. 189). The athletic victor in the Museo Civico, Agrigento, is the Sicilian counterpart of this Attic or Greek island god or youth (Hanfmann, 1967, p. 313, pl. 95).
A number of decorative herms flanking doorways in the houses of Pompeii, Herculaneum, and surrounding towns have something of the general aspect of this head, suggesting a date in the first century A.D. before the eruption of Vesuvius. The small size indicates a votive or funerary purpose, probably as part of a statuette. The archaistic and Severe Style qualities of this little head in a Pompeiian decorative context can be illustrated by a sculpture of unknown provenance, definitely not a forgery, in the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design (Ridgway, 1972, pp. 123, 235, no. 52).
Cornelius Vermeule and Amy Brauer
