Published Catalogue Text: Stone Sculptures: The Greek, Roman and Etruscan Collections of the Harvard University Art Museums , written 1990
71
Part of a Head of a Bearded God
The break runs irregularly through the mouth. The nose is broken away. The sculptured surfaces are worn and weathered(?). The back of the head was finished as a flat surface and has been smoothed off. There is a rectangular hole in the middle of the fillet around the forehead.
A dignified, bearded divinity was represented, Dionysos or Hermes. He has ample hair combed forward from the top of his head to the broad band or fillet, and somewhat archaistic, almost corkscrews curls around the forehead from ear to ear.
This fragment appears to have formed the upper part of a small decorative herm with a flat back to the head, shoulders, and shaft below. Such decorative sculptures were applied to the sides of doorways, niches, and elsewhere in Hellenistic and early Roman Imperial houses. A number of such sculptures, although in a more naturalistic Italic style, have been found in the houses at Pompeii.
A head of this type, clearly a Dionysos with a full, corkscrew beard and the ends of the fillets hanging like goats’ ears form the sides beyond his real ears, has been combined with an erotic scene on a two-sided, decorative relief of the Roman period form Cyprus (Karageorghis, 1984, pp. 214-217, pl. XXXIX, 2). The fragment in the Harvard University Art Museums could have come from just such a single-sided relief with a flat background rather than sculpture on the second side. When the back side was flat and finished, evidence from Pompeii indicates such reliefs, particularly oscilla or hanging reliefs, could be painted (Herrmann, 1983, p. 2, no. 1; Dwyer, 1981, p. 247, catalogue no. 136).
Other subjects were represented by these low-relief, facing heads on slabs with flat backgrounds. A fragment at Corinth seems to show the dying Medusa (Johnson, 1931, p. 136, no. 285).
Cornelius Vermeule and Amy Brauer
