Published Catalogue Text: Stone Sculptures: The Greek, Roman and Etruscan Collections of the Harvard University Art Museums , written 1990
140
Head of a Bearded Man
Much of the nose, the outer part of the right ear, and the entire top of the left ear are missing.
This portrait conveys a strong, frontal feeling. The hair is cut short, and occasionally the details of the curls are incised. The closed mouth conveys the suggestion of a smile.
There are a number of contemporary portraits of Romans and others similar to this bearded man, varying only in the shapes of their heads and the degrees to which hair and beard are cut or incised. The one-eyed man in Schloss Erbach is slightly older in years and sat for his veristic likeness, with more incision of hair and beard, nearly a decade or more later (Fittschen, 1977, pp. 92-93, no. 35, pl. 41, dated A.D. 250). In the Depot at Aydin (ancient Tralles), the bust of an older man has a noble and forceful face, with parallel grooves in the hair and greater "stippling" in the beard at the face (Inan, Rosenbaum, 1966, p. 175, no. 234, pl. CXXX, figs. 1, 2). A man from Rome, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, is likewise older, more emaciated, and represented with greater incision of what stringy hair remains (Richter, 1948, no. 94). Such men are the focal figures on the large sarcophagi marking the transition from earlier Severan styles to the incised verism of the middle of the century, as a head of the A.D. 230s to 240s in Leningrad bears witness (Voshchinina, 1974, p. 191, no. 76, pl. XCVII). The younger contemporary of this man is in the National Museum, Athens, and begins to show the slight shift of the eyes sideways, as characterizes portraiture of the period from the Emperor Maximinus the Thracian through the short reign of the Emperor Traianus Decius (A.D. 235-251) (Catling, 1982, pp. 6-7, fig. 3).
Cornelius Vermeule and Amy Brauer
