A GREEK BRONZE FIGURE OF AN AFRICAN

HELLENISTIC PERIOD, CIRCA LATE 2ND-EARLY 1ST CENTURY B.C.

Details

A GREEK BRONZE FIGURE OF AN AFRICAN
HELLENISTIC PERIOD, CIRCA LATE 2ND-EARLY 1ST CENTURY B.C.
The lean graceful youth depicted nude, standing with his weight on his slightly bowed left leg, leaning into his left hip, his right leg bent at the knee and turned out, the foot pulled back with the heel raised, the rounded buttocks prominent, his long torso modelled with subtle musculature, the right arm raised before him and bent at the elbow, the palm open toward his face, his left arm lengthened behind, the head turned slightly to his right on his long sturdy neck, the face with the distinct features of an African, with square jaw, high cheekbones, broad nose and finely-defined prominent lips, the eyes deeply recessed, likely once to receive now-missing inlays, the disheveled curly hair treated impressionistically
10¼ in. (26 cm.) high

Provenance

French Private Collection.
with Jean-Loup Despras, Galerie Orient-Occident, Paris, 1972.
French Private Collection.

Sale room notice

Please note that the provenance as supplied is incorrect; this lot was not sold by Galerie Orient-Occident, but Mr. Despras did supply an evaluation in 1972.

Lot Essay

Youths of Nilotic descent often served as models for Greek artists in the Hellenistic Period who sought to study the non-Greek features of various foreign types. As Snowden informs (p. 187 in Bugner, ed., The Image of the Black in Western Art, vol. 1), "The wide variety of physical features in blacks, the "pure," the Nilotic, and various gradations of black-white mixture, provided a range of opportunity for the employment of artistic skill." The Ptolemaic military exploits into Ethiopia brought large numbers of the African population into Egypt. Snowden acknowledges that the sheer quantity of these studies would indicate that the black "constituted a much larger element in the population of the Hellenistic world than has generally been realized (op. cit. p. 188)."

While many of the more famous images from this period tend to exploit the caricature of the slave and beggar, there are fine works of art, such as the present example, that portray these subjects with "sympathetic interest and dignity (p. 124 in Kozloff and Mitten, The Gods Delight, The Human Figure in Classical Bronze)." See for example the black youth, now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, clad in a mantle usually reserved for the intellectual classes (Kozloff and Mitten, op. cit., no. 19, p. 124ff.). For a bronze of similar size and grace, now in the Bibliothéque Nationale, Paris, see pls. 253-255, pp. 200-201 in Bugner, ed., op. cit.

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