Published Catalogue Text: Stone Sculptures: The Greek, Roman and Etruscan Collections of the Harvard University Art Museums , written 1990
72
Head of a Child or Eros
The face has been chipped and there is incrustation on the subject's right side and back of the head. The hair is worn, and, in any case, only the ends of the curls were finished in detail.
The dreamy, ideal expression combined with an impish smile suggests this head came from a statuette of Eros of a type popular around the Mediterranean near the end of the Roman Republic.
A smiling child of the Graeco-Roman period, in the British Museum, has a harsher version of the same qualities seen here, with perhaps a greater touch of individuality (Bieber, 1961, p. 138, fig. 546). A child, a very young girl because of the fillet-like diadem in her hair, has the same dreamy, polished aspect and expression; published when in the art market in Basel, it has been dated as early as the third century B.C. and relates to heads from Mount Parnassos (statue in Athens, no. 2772) and Paphos (the head in the British Museum, no. 1954) (Münzen und Medaillen A.G., Auktion 63, Basel, 29 June, 1983, p. 39, no. 94, pl. 37). Such statues dedicated in sanctuaries of Asklepios could represent happy, healthy children (Paribeni, e., 1959, pp. 57, no. 119, pl. 75, and 113, no. 316, pl. 148).
Such small heads of Eros also come from figures that were the supports for larger statues, as the Eros on a dolphin next to the left thigh of a Roman Imperial Aphrodite in Boston (Comstock, Vermeule, 1976, p. 120, no. 183), and the Eros striding forward beside the dolphin in a fragment from a similar statue, where only the lower half of the dolphin and the section of the supporting plinth are preserved (Christie's Sale, London, 13-14 December, 1983, p. 56, no. 339, color illus. and color plate on cover).
Cornelius Vermeule and Amy Brauer
