Published Catalogue Text: Stone Sculptures: The Greek, Roman and Etruscan Collections of the Harvard University Art Museums , written 1990
17
Head of Ares
The end of the nose and all of the head on a diagonal line through the upper lip are broken away. The back of the head and helmet are missing from behind the right ear.
This head is a Roman copy of an original of ca. 430-420 B.C., known as the Ares Borhese. The head is wearing an Attic helmet with visor and rudimentary crest. The roughened yet cold surfaces and the drill points at the inner corners of the pupils of the eyes date this copy in the Trajanic period, ca. A.D. 110.
Replicas of the Ares Borghese, associated with Alkamenes about 420 BC, are discussed in connection with the statue found in Building M at Side in 1950 (Inan, 1975, pp. 47-50, no. 10, pl. xxii; Inan, 1975a, pp. 69-71, no. 1). The fact that the statue has been found in decorative and official contexts at a wide variety of locations around the Graeco-Roman world, from Italy to Asia Minor and North Africa, shows that the original was famous, certainly attributable to one of the major masters working in Athens a decade or so after the Parthenon was finished (Picard, 1939, 11, 1, p. 250, 11, 2, pp. 578-580. fig. 237 Louvre).
The complete statue, showing the god or a young hero in divine guise, may have been made for the cults of Ares expanded in Attica as a result of the Peloponnesian Wars. The slender, athletic figure stands with weight on the left leg, left hip thrown out, right arm and hand lowered to the side, and left arm flexed with hand grasping the spear. The figure takes its name from the marble copy in the Louvre, Paris, which came from the Borghese collection in Rome (Fuchs, 1969, pp. 94-96, fig. 86).
Jenifer Neils has recently suggested that the Ares Borghese may be a statue of Theseus on the basis of three characteristics: hairstyle, ankleband and stance (Neils, 1988, pp. 155-158).
Cornelius Vermeule and Amy Brauer