Head of a Young Warrior

The face of this young warrior is fairly long, and the cheeks plump. The stiff, vertical, and somewhat frontal qualities of the head suggest that it was once part of a Hellenistic dedicatory or votive stele. Many of these stelai, and their counterparts for funerary purposes, show the subjects in frontal poses in architectural settings, as an example probably from Asia Minor in the Graf Lanckoronski collection in Vienna of a man of intellectual and athletic rather than military tendencies (Pfuhl, Möbius, 1977, I, p. 108, no. 254, II, p. 48); another, similar and helmetless head of a young man is on a stele in Istanbul from Madytos in the Thracian Chersonnesus (Pfuhl, Möbius, 1977, I, pp. 163-164, no. 538, II, pl. 83). The man ought to have been in the military service of a Hellenistic ruler or city, but Roman military personnel were buried in the Greek islands, Thrace, and Western Asia Minor at a date earlier than the imperial period.

This head is a good carving, in a traditional style found widely. The ultimate influence of Severe Style heads about 460 B.C. from Southern Italy or Sicily can be seen by comparison with a female figure with helmet-like headdress in the Museo Barracco, Rome (Schefold, Cahn, 1960, pp. 218, 220, no. 243, also pp. 58-59).

Cornelius Vermeule and Amy Brauer