Head of a Hellenistic Ruler: zu sehen — Harvard Art Museums

Head of a Hellenistic Ruler

first half 2nd century BCE · Sculpture

Über die Skulptur

This small head of a young man is turned slightly to the left. Individualized features such as the aquiline nose, the furrowed forehead, thick lips, and small heavy chin give his face a character. The pupils are each rendered by a small hole in the center of the iris. The slight twist of the head to the left tightens the sternomastoid muscle on the right side of the neck and breaks the symmetry of the representation. The subtlety of the plastic rendering suggests that the head belonged to a statuette rather than having been part of a bust from a roundel. The skull, with the exception of the forehead, is covered with short, thick locks and surrounded by a roll wound with a ribbon indicated in shallow relief. If this portrait is a representation of a Hellenistic ruler, this could be the royal diadem twisted around the strophion. The same attribute, however, could be worn by athletes and priests and also occurs on the heads of pseudo-portrait herms.

Royal portraits in the form of small bronze statuettes are known in the Hellenistic period, especially in Ptolemaic imagery, for Ptolemy II Philadelphos (309-246 BCE), perhaps for Ptolemy III Euergetes (246-222 BCE) who would have been assimilated to Hermes-Thoth, and for a late Ptolemaic ruler, perhaps identifiable as Ptolemy X Alexander I (110-109 and 107-88 BCE) (1). However, the head in the Harvard Art Museums, which is thought to have been acquired in Egypt by a previous owner, does not resemble any of these rulers or any other Ptolemy. The build of the face recalls portraits of the Pergamene king Eumenes II (197-158 BCE) (2), and the Seleucid king Antiochos IV Epiphanes (175-164 BCE), but it is not possible to identify this portrait as a representation of either.

This small head has the closest affinities with the probable portrait of the brother of Eumenes II, Attalos II (158-138 BCE), although the face of the Harvard head seems more elongated (3). One may detect the influence of Attalid iconography in this portrait type, notably in the curved profile of the nose, comparatively small eyes, round form of the chin below the small mouth, and the thick lips. However, a strophion is not worn in Attalid imagery, except on the coin portraits of Group II of Philhetairos, dated to c. 270-263 BCE. On these coins, the head of the founder of the dynasty, who never took the title of a king, is encircled by such a ring, around which is twisted a fillet whose ends flutter on the neck (4).

The function of such bronze statuettes representing kings remains little understood. One might suppose that these formed part of the decoration of private homes and consequently are to be associated with the category of domestic statuary, well attested for Hellenistic marble sculpture. The head of the statuette under discussion probably reflects a large-scale bronze. According to its possible identification as a king, it would have represented the ruler in heroic nudity holding a lance, which was a sculpture type made especially famous by Alexander the Great.