1920.44.221: Head of a City-Goddess or Geographical Personification

Published Catalogue Text: Stone Sculptures: The Greek, Roman and Etruscan Collections of the Harvard University Art Museums , written 1990
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Head of a City-Goddess or Geographical Personification

The nose is missing, and the face is badly damaged with the lips chipped away. There is also chipping on the eyebrows, forehead, chin, and right cheek. A drill has been used in the hair, corners of the mouth, and eyes.

This is probably a Greek Imperial work of the third century A.D. The heavy hair is drawn over the ears to form a knot at the back of the neck. She wears a fairly high crown with a flat top, decorated in relief with a running design (a wide rectangle with a semi-round, arched niched in the center). The modeling is broad in the contours of the face.

The crown is a stylized view of the gate and external arcades of a city wall, of the type seen in the reconstructions of the Palace of Diocletian at Split. Such urban and regional personifications have a long history in Graeco-Roman art, going back to the Tyche of Antioch in the early Hellenistic period. Roman reliefs (Louvre), statues (Liverpool), and Late Antique silver statuettes (British Museum) show the various figures that could have heads such as this (Toynbee, 1934, pp. 7-23, pls. XXI, XXIV, XXVII-XXX; Ashmole, 1929, pp. 23-24, no. 42, pl. 27, as Phyrgia).

The lack of angle to the head in relation to the neck shows that this head came from a standing or seated figure in frontal pose, not a figure based on the many later versions of the Tyche of Antioch. Such statues existed in every city of the Greek Imperial world, as coins confirm, and they were often gilded for admiration and transport on ceremonial occasions. A head, identified as Cybele or Tyche, must have belonged to a temple statue in the agora area of Corinth; it is, although fragmentary, a more academic version of the same head as that in the Harvard University Art Museums, both based generally on the art of the fifth century B.C. It is impossible to tell whether the head is from a standing or seated image (Johnson, 1931, pp. 46-47, no. 54). Cyrene has yielded a number of such geographical heads, one especially like the Harvard example (Paribeni, E., 1959, p. 147, no. 429, pl. 185, and nos. 425-428, pls. 184, 185).

Cornelius Vermeule and Amy Brauer