CIRCA 1ST CENTURY A.D.

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.