Published Catalogue Text: Stone Sculptures: The Greek, Roman and Etruscan Collections of the Harvard University Art Museums , written 1990
156 Post-Classical or Post-Antique
Colossal Head of a Goddess or Woman
The eyes are hollowed out, and the body has been worked for insertion in a statue. There are large cuts across the back of the hair and neck. The stone is incrusted with whitish material. The surface is dull.
This head appears to be a forgery after a type of the fifth century B.C., such as the Roman Imperial statue of a mourning captive (province?), known as the "Medea" and in the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence.
The head is turned to the right and is slightly lowered, with its gaze falling downward to the subject's left. The locks of hair are long and fall onto the shoulders, and the casually waved tresses come down low on the forehead, on either side of the central part. The lady wears a broad fillet across the top of the head. It disappears under the hair at the side.
Richard Norton saw the head not long before he wrote to Edward Forbes on May 29, 1899, "outside Rome in a vineyard....It must have been in some Villa or Forum--that's why I call it 'decorative...'. It represents, I take it, some conquered province and is not unlike the famous Ludovisi 'Medusa.'"
Over the years various persons who have studied the head have adduced parallels, ancient and modern. One of the latter is the restored head and upper shoulders, in high relief, of the male captive, of Celtic or Germanic origin, standing against a trophy and with a boar-topped standard at his right side in an architectural panel now placed, as no. 605, on the landing outside the entrance to the Galleria dei Candelabri of the Vatican. According to Edward W. Forbes, in notes on a European trip in 1905, Adolf Furtwangler said the head conflated aspects of the Lemnian Athena (as represented by the head in Bologna) and the Antinous Mondragone in the Louvre. Professor Furtwängler had viewed the head with Mr. Forbes on 4 October, 1904, and he studied it again with Matthew S. Prichard of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, on the following day. Professor Furtwängler summed up his feelings in a note written to Mr. Forbes after his departure from Boston: "Though it is always a beautiful thing, nourished with the beauty of Phidias' Lemnian Athena; and the difference is only, that the artist, who made this extract, did not live so far off from us."
Cornelius Vermeule and Amy Brauer
