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
