Photo © President and Fellows of Harvard College
Unable to open [object Object]: HTTP 0 attempting to load TileSource: https://ids.lib.harvard.edu/ids/iiif/20675051/info.json
Photo © President and Fellows of Harvard College
This object does not yet have a description.

Identification and Creation

Object Number
1920.44.144
Title
Head of a Young Girl or Boy
Classification
Sculpture
Work Type
head, sculpture
Period
Roman Imperial period
Culture
Roman?
Persistent Link
https://hvrd.art/o/292214

Physical Descriptions

Medium
Marble
Dimensions
17 cm (6 11/16 in.)

Provenance

Recorded Ownership History
Miss Elizabeth Gaskell Norton, Boston, MA and Miss Margaret Norton, Cambridge, MA (by 1920), gift; to the Fogg Museum, 1920.

Note: The Misses Norton were daughters of Charles Elliot Norton (1827-1908).

Acquisition and Rights

Credit Line
Harvard Art Museums/Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Gift of the Misses Norton
Accession Year
1920
Object Number
1920.44.144
Division
Asian and Mediterranean Art
Contact
am_asianmediterranean@harvard.edu
Permissions

The Harvard Art Museums encourage the use of images found on this website for personal, noncommercial use, including educational and scholarly purposes. To request a higher resolution file of this image, please submit an online request.

Descriptions

Published Catalogue Text: Stone Sculptures: The Greek, Roman and Etruscan Collections of the Harvard University Art Museums , written 1990
85

Head of a Young Girl or Boy

The back of the head is flat, and evenly separated from the torso. The surface of the face is badly damaged, including the nose, lips, left eyebrow, cheeks, and chin, also left brow. There are marks of the drill.

The head is frontal; the waved hair starts far back on the wide, high forehead. The type seems to be ideal rather than specific, and it recalls both the draped girls of Attica around 340 B.C. and Eros with the bow, identified with Lysippos about the same time or as late as 330 BC. The Roman version of the Lysippic Eros in the Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore, shows that the young god's face is thinner and the features sharper (Bieber, 1961, p. 38, fig. 88).

The same ambivalence as to sex, girl or boy, seems to exist in connection with a Head of a Boy, dated in the fourth century B.C., at Johns Hopkins University. The parallels for this Baltimore head are also with the "little bears" (Arctoi) from the sanctuary of Artemis at Brauron, but the famous Eros with the bow by Lysippos has been shown to have represented the next stage of development in representations of children in the fourth century B.C. (Williams, 1984, pp. 20-21, no. 6). Since the Lysippic Eros is known only from Graeco-Roman marble copies and since the Harvard head seems to be related but individual as a head of a girl or boy, it seems safest to class this sculpture as work of the Roman Imperial period. The sculptor of this child was certainly influenced by the art of the fourth century B.C., and a divine child (like the baby Dionysos) may have been intended.

Cornelius Vermeule and Amy Brauer

Publication History

  • Cornelius C. Vermeule III and Amy Brauer, Stone Sculptures: The Greek, Roman and Etruscan Collections of the Harvard University Art Museums, Harvard University Art Museums (Cambridge, MA, 1990), p. 99, no. 85

Verification Level

This record has been reviewed by the curatorial staff but may be incomplete. Our records are frequently revised and enhanced. For more information please contact the Division of Asian and Mediterranean Art at am_asianmediterranean@harvard.edu