Pulled some 120 years ago from the treacherous maritime straits near the island of Antikythera, this shaggy fellow is one of the finest Hellenistic bronzes to survive. With that engulfing moustache and beard, tousled coiffure, and penetrating gaze (hard to resist a good pair of inlaid eyes), it’s an extraordinarily powerful sculpture.
Generally accepted as a philosopher’s portrait, of the (generally posthumous) type that became popular from the 3rd century onwards, it is also occasionally reconstructed with some disembodied limbs and drapery from the same shipwreck and considered as an orator. If you’re given to reading personality into ancient portraits and examining them ‘psychologically’ (I am guilty as charged)), then he’s really great fun.
And, as usual, I am very interested in his hair. Much more than a fashion statement, hair was a sort of primal, springy life-force in the Greek world (one thinks of Alexander’s irrepressible anastole) to be tamed and bound by civilizing forces- and no one capitalized more on its visual potential better than Hellenistic sculptors. The aspect of dishevelment here could expected of an individual who had more in his mind than grooming dictated by societal mores (eg. Diogenes living in a pithos cavorting around naked). And it could also be (I think) a visual cue of some essential imbalance lurking within…the inner life of a man who rejected Athenian sophrosyne or was, perhaps, too brilliant to ever achieve it.
