Published Catalogue Text: Stone Sculptures: The Greek, Roman and Etruscan Collections of the Harvard University Art Museums , written 1990
41
Head of a Long-Faced Philosopher
The surfaces are very water-worn. A section of the left rear of the head was damaged and restored in antiquity. The restoration is now missing, but the dowel remains.
This head could be a portrait of a late Antonine or Severan man of intellect in the traditions of Attic art in the fourth century B.C. The head had been compared with a supposed likeness of Aristippos, a sophist from Cyrene who lived about 435 to 360 B.C., was a predecessor of Epikouros, and a pupil of Socrates in Athens. Aristippos, identified by Karl Schefold, appears on a small double herm in Berlin; the other half of the herm shows his daughter (Richter, 1965, 11, pp. 175-176, figs. 1015k, also 1016, 1017).
The face of the old man in the Berlin double herm is that of a typical elder on a large Attic grave relief, such as the mourner contemplating the heroized hunter-athlete on the famous stele from the Ilissos River, in the National Museum, Athens (Diepolder, 1931, pp. 51, 59, pl. 48). The Robinson head might still be the same distinguished intellectual of the fourth century BC world, Aristippos, or someone else, but, despite its worn surfaces, the face has more individuality and character than the man in the Berlin double herm.
Cornelius Vermeule and Amy Brauer
