18TH CENTURY A.D. OR EARLIER

細節

A CREAM CHALCEDONY FEMALE PORTRAIT BUST
18TH CENTURY A.D. OR EARLIER
With idealized features and serene expression, her luxuriant and finely striated hair centrally parted and swept back from her face and over her ears, passing under a diadem which is decorated with central circular roundel containing a female portrait bust in profile flanked by stars, she wears a veil with zigzag border on the back of her head, mounted
1 7/8 in. (4.7 cm.) high

來源

Inherited in 1975 by the present owner from his uncle who had acquired the piece from John Hewett, London, in the early 1950s.

注意事項

No VAT will be charged on the hammer price, but VAT at 17.5% will be added to the buyer's premium, which is invoiced on a VAT inclusive basis.

拍品專文

The dating of this bust is problematic and has divided opinion for several decades. Cases have been made for an 18th Century date and also for a Roman dating of either early 1st Century or late 2nd Century A.D. The type - a head of a woman with idealised features wearing stephane and veil on the back of the head and the hairstyle at the front - derives from Hellenistic portraiture, perhaps intending to conflate a ruler with a deity; Ptolemaic royal princesses or queens are depicted in this way on both coins and gems. In the early 1st Century A.D. in Rome, this Ptolemaic Alexandrian tradition of glyptic art was used in the service of Julian propaganda and the empress Livia was represented in exactly this fashion in all manner of portraits, as a goddess, her hair parted in the middle and crimped into soft waves pulled back into a bun with small wisps of hair falling on to her cheeks, most often wearing diadem, wreath or fillet, and sometimes a veil worn on the back of the head. A similar hairstyle is seen later on mid-Antonine portraits, sometimes with veils, recalling the Livia type but dating to the 2nd Century A.D.