Published Catalogue Text: Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern Bronzes at the Harvard Art Museums
This slender, muscular nude youth displays a number of features typical of Transitional-style male figures, including planar hips, featureless abdomen, high inguinal ridge, and muscular but slender body. His legs, rendered with bulging calves and prominent kneecaps, descend from high rounded buttocks. The feet are projecting tabs with no incisions to represent the toes. His weight rests on his right foot, while his left foot is drawn back slightly. His slender arms end in hands marked by thumbs, and the featureless fingers are cast as one mass. His left arm extends sideways, bent at the elbow, with palm downward. He raises his right arm to the level of his forehead, palm upward. This gesture, which resembles a greeting or a salute, may be the result of some blow or distortion of the arm after it was cast. The head, raised on a cylindrical neck, is large in proportion to the rest of the figure. The face has a prominent long nose, large oval eyes, and full lips. The hair rises as a framing border over the forehead and continues downward on both sides, covering the ears and wrapping around into a loop or curl that tucks under a fillet or diadem. The locks on the hair of the forehead band and krobylos are marked throughout by tiny vertical incisions. However, the hemispherical crown of the head has no incisions. A small round knob projects from the back at the level of the shoulders. Beneath this, a larger knob, square with rounded corners and a flat surface, extends from the small of the back. These features suggest that this youth was attached to a larger object, perhaps a tripod or large bronze vase.
Bronze statuettes with such knobs projecting from their backs in the Museo Nazionale di Reggio Calabria come from excavations at Locri in southern Italy. The rather awkward squarish modeling of this youth’s body and his disproportionately large head also suggest that he is the product of a bronze-casting workshop somewhere in Magna Graecia, perhaps Locri itself (1). The unusual coiffure recalls some representations of Apollo, founder and sanctioner of the Greek colonial foundations in Southern Italy and Sicily. The date is probably somewhere between 480 and 470 BCE.
NOTES:
1. On Greek bronzes in southern Italy, see U. Jantzen, Bronzewerkstätten in Grossgriechenland und Sizilien, Jahrbuch des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts, Ergänzungsheft 13 (Berlin, 1937). For style and modeling of the body, see G. P. Carratelli et al., Megale Hellas: Storia e civiltà della Magna Grecia (Milan, 1983) no. 388. For additional bibliography, see Kunstwerke der Antike, Münzen and Medaillen (Basel), May 6, 1967, lot 7.
David G. Mitten
