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A Roman marble portrait head of Alexander the Great image 1
A Roman marble portrait head of Alexander the Great image 2
A Roman marble portrait head of Alexander the Great image 3
A Roman marble portrait head of Alexander the Great image 4
A Roman marble portrait head of Alexander the Great image 5
A Roman marble portrait head of Alexander the Great image 6
Lot 128

A Roman marble portrait head of Alexander the Great

Antiquities
28 November 2019, 10:30 GMT
London, New Bond Street

Sold for £35,062.50 inc. premium

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A Roman marble portrait head of Alexander the Great
Circa 2nd Century A.D.
Depicted gazing to the right, his oval face with lidded, articulated, almond-shaped eyes, his long wavy leonine hair, with characteristic anastole, falling onto his neck, 20cm high

Footnotes

Provenance:
with Alfred Speelman, London.
Mr A. collection, Paris, acquired from the above 2 April 1975.

The Roman admiration for important historical characters meant that portraits of Alexander continued to be a favoured subject well beyond the Hellenistic period. Based on the drill work and the articulated eyes of the present lot, this sculpture should be understood to be a Roman copy of a Greek original, which likely dated to the mid-4th Century B.C.

Cf. a small-scale alabaster example at the Brooklyn Museum, acc. no. 54.162, with similarly 'exaggeratedly turbulent hair' (The Search for Alexander: An Exhibition, New York, 1980, p. 118). The youthful countenance and meditative gaze of the present lot calls to mind a similarly-sized sculpture in the Berlin Museum, Arachne database no. 2430.

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Bid now on these items

An Anatolian marble idol
A Mesopotamian clay cuneiform foundation cone with dedication inscription of King Lipit-Ishtar of Isin
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