Published Catalogue Text: Stone Sculptures: The Greek, Roman and Etruscan Collections of the Harvard University Art Museums , written 1990
15
Head of a Young God or Hero
The nose is chipped, and the top of the head is discolored. There are two drill holes above the ears. The hair is arranged in eleven curls around the forehead.
A number of heads of young gods or mortals--including the Apollo of the West Pediment at Olympia, a head in the Volos (Thessaly) Museum, and a head in the Cyrene Museum--are related, although no other has the exact arrangement of the curls around the forehead (Ridgway, 1970, pp. 57-58, figs. 73, 76-77, 80-83). A nearly life-sized head, with a neck probably worked for insertion in a herm, from the Ludwig Pollak and Jacob Hirsch collections, shows how such heads appeared as early Roman imperial copies in marble on a full-sized scale (Ars Antiqua, A.G. no. 1, May 2, 1959, pp. 12-13, no. 30, pls. 13, 14).
A life-sized head (albeit damaged, with most of the area above the forehead missing) once seen in the Basel and Zurich art markets would suggest that the tiny head at Harvard probably came from Sicily (Andre Emmerich Gallery, Inc., 1975). The tiny scale of this head, together with the fact that it is an original rather than a copy, suggests that this statue was carved in Sicily or Southern Italy between the Late Archaic and Transitional periods, a time when good marbles were relatively expensive in Western Greece.
Cornelius Vermeule and Amy Brauer
