Published Catalogue Text: Stone Sculptures: The Greek, Roman and Etruscan Collections of the Harvard University Art Museums , written 1990
86
Head of a Bearded God
The top of the head is missing on a diagonal line from the right to left, just above the ear. The use of the drill is evident in the beard, hair, mouth, and eyes. The marble has considerable crystalline structure.
The head is seemingly from a high relief. The style places it with sculptures from western Asia Minor, and the date ought to be ca. A.D. 150-175. The subject could be Zeus, including Ammon, Asklepios, or perhaps Poseidon. There is a suggestion of the horns of Ammon in the way the hair curls out on either side of the eyes with their incised pupils. A late Hellenistic, more classical model for this head, with subdued hair, was evidently found on Crete and may have had the outer parts of hair and head finished in plaster or even wood (Schefold, Cahn, 1960, pp. 280, 283, no. 391).
Maxwell L. Anderson has pointed out, after detailed study of this head, that it could come from a free-standing statue of the thin type popular at the outset of the late Antique period in Graeco-Roman art. He cites Vatican, Museo Gregoriano Profano inv. 10265, "which is almost identically flat on the back, but is clearly from a free-standing statue of Asklepios." He also adduces the example of Kassel SK 86, a Roman Imperial version of an Asklepios of the fourth century B.C. He suggests the complete statue would have been some 1.75 m in height.
This head, with its curls seeming to flatten out sidewise, may have once formed one half of a double herm, similar to the Ammon and Dionysos in Berlin (Conze, 1891, p. 10, no. 11). Otherwise, the Harvard head has a decorative frontality that brings to mind the head of older bearded divinities in the center of architectural tondi or the coffering of florid ensembles of carving of the type found in the theaters of Asia Minor in the Antonine period, Side in Pamphylia offering a good example. An indicator of the stylistic source for and the date of this fragment can be found in comparison with the portrait of a young lady, veiled, from a large Asiatic sarcophagus, a fragment from the bed of the Pactolus River at Sardis, Turkey (Hanfmann, Ramage, 1978, pp. 134-135, no. 180, fig. 328).
The imaginative curls of the hair contrasted with the flattened beard make this head a later, Asiatic parallel to the head of the bearded god (perhaps Oceanus, based on a Zeus or Poseidon of ultimately Pheidian type) in the decorative shield reconstructed from fragments of the flanking colonnade of the Forum of Augustus in Rome, dated 10-2 BC (Boethius, Ward-Perkins, 1970, p. 191, pl. 108). In the Antonine period, there is the imago clipeata of the oak-wreathed Zeus in Copenhagen, from Venice (Poulsen, 1951, p. 363, no. 520a, pl. IX). A less sophisticated, carefully worked imago clipeata bust of Zeus, from Rome, is in Berlin (Conze, 1891, p. 381, no. 938). A console with "Caelus," also in Copenhagen, can be adduced; it comes from Rome (Poulsen, 1951, p. 214, no. 289a, supplement, pl. v).
The architectural enrichment of the great Hadrianic to early Antonine theater at Side is actually very sober and classicizing when compared with the carving of the middle-Antonine (Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus, c. AD 163) theater at Aspendus. Architectural carvings related to, but earlier than the Harvard Museums' fragment include the busts of Artemis and Demeter in the ceilings of the decorative aediculae of the theater's scaenae frons (Müfid, 1963, pp. 136-137, figs. 112, 113).
Yet another possible origin for this fragment, or at least, a related but presumably earlier sculpture is the figure of Atlas found near Seville in Spain and in the Museo Arqueologico there. The small statue of the giant with his head, shoulders, and hands supporting his globe was dedicated to the Emperor Claudius in the year 49 A.D. (Garcia y Bellido, 1949, pp. 108-109, no. 107, p. 85).
Cornelius Vermeule and Amy Brauer
