Published Catalogue Text: Stone Sculptures: The Greek, Roman and Etruscan Collections of the Harvard University Art Museums , written 1990
141
Small Head of a Boy
The surfaces are slightly damaged and abraded. The end of the nose is missing. Drill points have been used in the ears and the tearducts of the eyes. The marble is from the northern Greek islands or western Asia Minor.
The boy has short hair, not deeply incised, and somewhat puffy jowls. The pupils of the eyes were doubtless finished in paint and seem to have been lightly incised, with large circles. The hair lies like a tight-fitting cap around the head.
The small size of this portrait suggests it was made as a memorial in a household shrine or a dedication at a small sanctuary, or in a tomb of modest proportions. It may have come from a draped figure standing in an aedicula or niche.
A slightly larger head of an older man, in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, comes from central Italy and could well have been made at the same time, for the same purpose (Comstock, Vermeule, 1976, p. 240, no. 376). Among the many comparable contemporary heads of Roman boys in the age of Imperial crisis, there is a head in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen (no. 766b), which Vagn Poulsen has identified as a novice in the cult of Isis, because of the long ringlets at the back, and as from the Greek provinces of the empire, because of the style (Poulsen, V., 1974, pp. 181-182, no. 187, pl. CCCIV). If the head in the Prince of Hesse's collection at Schloss Fasanerie near Fulda is really Severus Alexander between A.D. 223-225, then the Harvard portrait could be earlier and perhaps have Imperial connections (Heintze, 1968, pp. 69-70, 107, no.l 46, pls. 76, 132 a-c). Once the simple, veristic style of the post-Severan-baroque third century was established, portraits of boys aged about ten to fourteen tended to take on a certain timelessness, depending mostly on physical characteristics for individuality. Such seems to be the case here.
Cornelius Vermeule and Amy Brauer
