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Lot Essay
The portraiture of Alexander the Great follows an immediately recognizable formula that includes a number of characteristic traits such as a full head of hair, upswept over the forehead in an anastole or cowlick, large deep-set eyes, full, slightly parted lips and a strong, athletic neck. Although these features are not necessarily all present in a single portrait, the reoccurring trait in representations of the Macedonian ruler is the anastole. This over life-sized head, despite its fragmentary nature, can easily be attributed to Alexander owing to a number of marked characteristics that include the anastole.
This head of Alexander the Great combines motives and compositional forms of two ascribed types: the so-called Schwarzenberg and the Azara types. As Kovacs (op. cit. p. 48) notes, most strikingly, the slight tilt of the head and the way in which it is turned to the left is reminiscent of the Schwarzenberg type, a Roman copy of a contemporary portrait, now in Vienna: A. Stewart, Faces of Power, Alexander's Image and Hellenistic Politics, Berkeley, 1993, pl. 40. Additionally, the anastole does not fall like a fountain, steeping upwards and then down again, rather there are individual strands on either side that cascade out like a fan. However, the profile to the left is similar to that of Azara type (named after a herm portrait now at the Louvre, Paris, inv. no. MA436), with the separation of the fringe to the main body of hair and the tight, close fitting strands covering the skull, instead of an organically shaped mass of hair seen in the Schwarzenberg or Erbach types.
A plaster cast of this head is now displayed in The Museum of Casts of Classical Statues, Munich. (Inv. No. 932) and the head can be found on the Arachne database as number 6120122.
This head of Alexander the Great combines motives and compositional forms of two ascribed types: the so-called Schwarzenberg and the Azara types. As Kovacs (op. cit. p. 48) notes, most strikingly, the slight tilt of the head and the way in which it is turned to the left is reminiscent of the Schwarzenberg type, a Roman copy of a contemporary portrait, now in Vienna: A. Stewart, Faces of Power, Alexander's Image and Hellenistic Politics, Berkeley, 1993, pl. 40. Additionally, the anastole does not fall like a fountain, steeping upwards and then down again, rather there are individual strands on either side that cascade out like a fan. However, the profile to the left is similar to that of Azara type (named after a herm portrait now at the Louvre, Paris, inv. no. MA436), with the separation of the fringe to the main body of hair and the tight, close fitting strands covering the skull, instead of an organically shaped mass of hair seen in the Schwarzenberg or Erbach types.
A plaster cast of this head is now displayed in The Museum of Casts of Classical Statues, Munich. (Inv. No. 932) and the head can be found on the Arachne database as number 6120122.