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A Roman limestone portrait head of Marcellus image 1
A Roman limestone portrait head of Marcellus image 2
Lot 154

A Roman limestone portrait head of Marcellus

Antiquities
7 July 2016, 10:30 BST
London, New Bond Street

Sold for £18,750 inc. premium

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A Roman limestone portrait head of Marcellus
Augustan, circa 25-20 B.C.
The young man depicted with thick hair swept forward towards the fringed brow, his large almond-shaped eyes with pronounced rims, with high cheek bones and full lips, the neck slightly turning in motion, 37cm high

Footnotes

Provenance:
French private collection. Acquired by the owner's great-grandfather in Algeria in the late 19th Century, thence by descent.

Literature:
Marcus Claudius Marcellus (42-23 B.C.), was the eldest son of the Emperor Augustus's sister Octavia the Younger and therefore nephew to the emperor. He married the emperor's daughter Julia only two years prior to his death at about 19 years of age. The Theatre of Marcellus in Rome was posthumously named after him.

Certainly some of the surviving portraits of Marcellus were posthumous and honorific and this example may well have had the same purpose. For example, the full length portrait of an idealised Marcellus as Hermes by the Athenian sculptor Cleomenes, now in the Musée du Louvre, inv. no. MR315 (MA1207).

For a similar portrait bust of Marcellus in marble, now in the Capitoline Museum, Rome, cf. K. Fittschen and P. Zanker, Katalog der römischen Porträts in den Capitolinischen Museen und den anderen kommunalen Sammlungen der Stadt Rom 1. Kaiser- und Prinzenbildnisse, Mainz, 1985, pl. 19.21.22.

For further discussion of the type, see V. Poulsen, 'Nero, Britannicus and Others. Iconographical Studies', ActaArch, 22, 1951, including a related marble head now in the Musée St. Raymond, Toulouse: p.131 cat. no. 4.

Additional information

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