Published Catalogue Text: Stone Sculptures: The Greek, Roman and Etruscan Collections of the Harvard University Art Museums , written 1990
54
Small Female Head
The top of the hair, the back of the head, and the neck are missing. The top to a slightly diagonal line across the back of the head appears to have been finished in another material or covered with plaster or a veil. The break at the back is flat, slightly irregular, and the break across the neck is more irregular.
The head is almost certainly a Roman copy of the first century A.D. from (or of) a Hellenistic statue of about 200 B.C. The hair is parted in the middle and waved. The features are rather flatly modeled, the face being almost diamond-shaped, the eyes dreamy, the nose pointed and the lips generously curved.
One can see the model of a major Pergamene image in the manner of the fifth century B.C. for this head. The overlifesized head of Hera or Demeter given to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, by the symphony conductor Hans von Bulow in 1889, shows the Pergamene intermediary between the Lowell head and Pheidian images of the fifth century B.C. (Comstock, Vermeule, 1976, p. 58, no. 90). A mannered version of this type of head combines both the elements of the fifth century B.C. and the softening influences of Praxiteles around 350 B.C., all put together in the late Hellenistic period and then copied for decorative purposes under the Flavians or Trajan, that is, from about A.D. 70 to 115 of the Roman Empire. The copy in the Museum of Art of the Rhode Island School of Design was found in Rome about 1926 (Ridgway, 1972, pp. 71-72, 189-192, no. 27). A more animated, more Pergamene head of this general type, a Roman copy slightly larger than lifesize and therefore based on a cult image, seems to have come from Italy, probably the area around Rome, and is in the Wellesley College Museum of Art (Vermeule, C., Vermeule, E., 1972, p. 282, illus.).
Small heads of this general type and in this style of carving have been found among the late Hellenistic sculptures of Delos. When bodies have been preserved, they range from Artemis with her stag to sandal-binding Aphrodites (Marcadé 1969, pls. XLI-XLVII). A companion from the world of the ultimate prototype(s) exists in a smallish Pentelic marble head, seemingly from a high relief and dated 425-400 BC, from Cyrene (Paribeni, E., 1959, pp. 32-33, no. 47, pl. 47).
Cornelius Vermeule and Amy Brauer
