This portrait came as something as a shock to me – I’m used to seeing shined up Severan portraits with stylised somnolent eyes, alarming hairdos, and an all together more graphic, surface-oriented approach to the carving (if that convoluted thought makes any kind of sense).
Here, the heavy-lidded third century aspect is there, not exaggerated to the point of dopiness. The eyes are incised and drilled, with an off-centre glance that reads as inscrutable rather than sneaky. The lips have nothing beaky or sausage-y to them, but a plump cupid’s bow and an organic settling into the flesh of the cheeks with discretely drilled commissures. And rather than superficial etching into the stone, there is a fluffy shag to the youth’s cropped hair, a restrained vigour in the way it lifts slightly at the front.
Found on the slopes of the Akropolis (with a wash of iron staining from the soil there, both distinctive and attractive) this remarkably sensitive head serves as a cogent reminder that the astonishing skill of Athenian sculptors never wavered. There is no great break with the Golden Age of Pericles to be seen here, but a glimmer of that unflagging ingenuity some six centuries later.
