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A New Metope Head from the Parthenon1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 September 2015

Arthur Bernard Cook
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Extract

Some years ago at a London sale of antiquities I acquired three marbles described as ‘Graeco-Roman heads.’ Sale Catalogues are sometimes (not often) unduly modest. One of these heads is in fact an Aphrodite of the Petworth type in close-grained lychnítes, and might be assigned to the closing years of the fourth century, though I should prefer to call it shop-work of a somewhat later period. A second head is a fragment broken from a small portrait statue in crystalline island marble presumably from the quarries of Naxos: it once wore a metal diadem pegged into a single drill-hole on the nape of the neck and perhaps represented some Hellenistic prince. But the third head (Pl. I), which forms the main subject of this paper, is of greater moment, for it is—as all who have seen it agree—an Attic original of the mid fifth century, and as such merits the most careful and circumspect investigation.

Of its provenance and history little can be said. It came, like other items sold with it, from a collection formed about 1830 by the grandfather of its late owner. The collector was a wealthy man who had certainly visited Egypt and probably made purchases in Rome. In short, we have the usual story of a well-to-do traveller returning from the Grand Tour with a trunk or two full of Levantine spoils.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Hellenic Studies , Volume 61 , November 1941 , pp. 6 - 13
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies 1941

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References

2 From a photograph by Mr. G. Strickland.

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