Getty Museum

Portrait Head of a Man

Date

75–50 B.C.

Medium

Marble

Culture

Greek

Department

Sculpture

Institution

Getty Museum

A middle-aged man with high cheekbones, a wide mouth and heavy-lidded eyes is the subject of this portrait. His facial features are highly individualized, but his identity remains unknown. One clue to his identity is the fillet or thin headband holding his long hair in place. Although the fillet is often a royal attribute, poets and intellectuals would sometimes wear one, especially in this thin string-like form. Also, the man's hairstyle may mark him as an intellectual rather than a ruler. His long, limp, unkempt locks may proclaim his indifference to material things, an attitude in keeping with one more concerned with matters of the mind than the body. Hellenistic rulers, on the other hand, tended to favor a voluminous, tousled hairstyle derived from that of Alexander the Great. It is difficult to determine whether this portrait is a Greek work produced in the first century B.C. or a later Roman copy of such a work. Certain stylistic and technical features, such as the deeply drilled channel between the lips, appear to be Roman, but this type of statue was not one that Roman artists frequently copied.

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