A ROMAN MARBLE HEAD OF EROS
THE PROPERTY OF A GENTLEMAN 
A ROMAN MARBLE HEAD OF EROS

CIRCA 1ST CENTURY A.D.

Details
A ROMAN MARBLE HEAD OF EROS
CIRCA 1ST CENTURY A.D.
Possibly from a figure of the god stringing his bow, his head turned to his right, gazing downwards, with heavy-lidded, unarticulated eyes and luxuriant hair with curling locks along the side and back and a central plait from forehead over crown, his lips slightly parted
9½ in. (24.1 cm.) high
Provenance
with Galerie Nefer, Zurich, 1980s-1990s.
Private collection, Switzerland.
Further details
THE PROPERTY OF A GENTLEMAN

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Lot Essay

This youthful head of Eros most likely belonged to a Roman marble copy of an original Greek statue attributed to the 4th Century B.C. sculptor Lysippos. Literary sources record the existence in antiquity of three different statues of Eros with his bow, with the Lysippan version of an adolescent Eros caught in the moment of stringing his bow surviving in a number of full-scale Roman copies. Lysippos' original employed a characteristically dynamic use of space, with arms extended forward and right, the torso curving inward, and the head in profile. For full-size versions in the Capitoline Museum, Rome (Mus. Cap. 410), and the Venice Archaeological Museum (Mus. Arch. 121), cf., C. Augé and P. L. de Bellefonds, 'Eros', Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologicae Classicae III, Zurich und München, 1986, p. 637, nos 352a and 352b; and for a similar head in Parian marble now in the British Musem (BM 1680), cf., M. Bieber, The Sculpture of the Hellenistic Age, New York, 1967, fig. 89.

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