Published Catalogue Text: Stone Sculptures: The Greek, Roman and Etruscan Collections of the Harvard University Art Museums , written 1990
1 Cycladic
Head
There are a few brown stains on the back. The area around the even break across the base of the neck is chipped. The very top of the head was once restored in plaster.
The head is almost round and rises from the elongated, tubular neck. The entire profile is flat and two-dimensions. The eyes are large and bulbous, and the nose is indicated by both modeling and incision. The mouth is incised. Two diagonal indentations between the round part of the face and the neck are intended to suggest the chin.
The crudeness of this head might speak of the transition from the end of the Stone Age to the early Bronze Age in Helladic, Cycladic, or western Anatolian land. It might also speak of something later but rustic in style and origin, rather than some work of the Christian Dark Ages or a modern village's idea of what Early Cycladic art should be. Compare this with the unusual male (?) head published in a Basel collection and its documented parallels, although the latter has a triangular face, ending with a very pointed chin (Thimme, Getz-Preziosi, 1977, pp. 234, 440-441, no. 76). The Harvard head conforms more to the shape of a head of unknown provenance published in a German private collection (Thimme, Getz-Preziosi, 1977, pp. 283, 479, no. 210).
P. Getz-Preziosi indicates that this head went through a transformation from torso to head and neck in Cycladic ( Bronze Age) times, but there remains the possibility, seen in crude cutting beside the "nose" and the slightly fresh gash of the "mouth," that this fragment was reworked in later times. A brown stone head found at Corinth in 1901 shows the timeless qualities of such rustic endeavors (Johnson, 1931, p. 6, no. 3).
Cornelius Vermeule and Amy Brauer
