Published Catalogue Text: Stone Sculptures: The Greek, Roman and Etruscan Collections of the Harvard University Art Museums , written 1990
142
Head of a Bearded Man
The head is a badly battered masterpiece. Most of the nose, the areas of the eyes, the ears, and the lower part of the beard around the chin are missing or damaged. Where preserved, the surfaces are in excellent condition, characterized by the beautiful, high polish of the skin.
This powerful countenance has a superficial resemblance to several portraits identified as the Emperor Macrinus (A.D. 217-218) or, possibly, a high official of around A.D. 243. In the Harvard portrait, however, the forms are more solidified and the treatment of incised and sculpted hair is more pronounced and beautifully handled yet entirely devoid of life. This confirms a date near the last years of the Emperor Gallienus (A.D. 260-268) or even into the following decade.
Both quality and condition have given this Roman portrait public popularity and scholarly attention, as the long list of exhibitions monographs, and articles suggest. Professor Hanfmann discovered the head in the basement storage of Harvard's Busch-Reisinger Museum, lying among the large lot of medieval and other, mostly architectural fragments purchased in New York a few months previously at the epic, four-part sale of the famous dealer Joseph Brummer's stock. The head's debut was in the 1950 exhibition of Ancient Sculpture that Professor and Mrs. Hanfmann arranged with the graduate students in ancient art. Full publication came in Professor Hanfmann's Latomus XI monograph, where the portrait was placed in the time of Valerian or Gallienus (A.D. 253-260, 260-268). The catalogues of two major exhibitions, Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, 1968-1969, and the Ackland Art Center, University of North Carolina, April 5-May 17, 1970, confirmed these dates, with minor variations. Vagn Poulsen in 1974 was the scholar who first mentioned Macrinus; the debate has continued and will do so.
The use of Luna or Carrara marble localizes the portrait in the Latin West, presumably Italy. As emperor (A.D. 217-218), Macrinus never came closer to Rome than Chalcedon on the Bosphorus where he was overtaken by the soldiers of Elagabalus (A.D. 218-222) and killed, but he did have an extensive Roman Imperial coinage, and so his image was available in Italy. All this throws smoke in the face of the fact that the Brummer-Harvard portrait combines a type of "barbered head" with "plastic accentuation of each curl" (of the lower beard) (noted by Charlotte Robl, Ackland Art Center, 1970) which can only belong to the decades of transition to the Late Antique. Although more sensitive in spirit than the numismatic portraits of Claudius II (A.D. 268-270), Aurelian (A.D. 270-275), or Probus (A.D. 276-282), tough soldiers all, similarities in hair and beard have led to the date proposed here. The subject was a private person, like the men of success and intellect represented on the big sarcophagi of the time.
Cornelius Vermeule and Amy Brauer
