Published Catalogue Text: Stone Sculptures: The Greek, Roman and Etruscan Collections of the Harvard University Art Museums , written 1990
70
Fragment of a Statuette of a Man
The head, neck, lower left leg, feet, and plinth are broken away. The surfaces at the front have heavy incrustation. The statuette is unfinished.
The subject was shown in the heroic nude, and may be Herakles with his club in the lowered right hand and the apples of the Hesperides in the raised extended left hand. This arm was probably also wrapped in the skin of the Nemean Lion, but the surviving traces cannot confirm this hypothesis.
If indeed it is Herakles, the type is derived from a statue created around 350 B.C. in the style of Skopas. The lost original statue, in marble, could be that by Skopas himself which appears to have been set up in the gymnasium at Sikyon and which can be visualized from two complete Roman versions, one in the Los Angeles County Museum (sometimes on loan to the J. Paul Getty Museum) and one at Osterley Park House in Middlesex, near London Airport (Lattimore, 1975, pp. 17-23, figs. 1-5; Caputo, Traversari, 1976, pp. 26-27, no. 6—a small statue, headless, with extensive parallels).
The nature of the carving and the type of marble, combined with the size, suggest this unfinished statuette could have come from one of the workshops on Delos before the sackings of 88 and 69 BC (Marcade, 1969, p. 505, pl. IV, especially nos. A 3825, A 6622, "sculptures inachevees"). Comparable for complexity of subject is the small Apollo, of the Cleveland Museum type, with the lower limbs unfinished because the marble split across the tripod support, left foot, and plinth; the small statue was once in the art market in Athens and Copenhagen (Arndt, Amelung, Lippold, 1893-1950, no. 4996).
Cornelius Vermeule and Amy Brauer
