- Museum number
- 1805,0703.91
- Description
-
Marble portrait bust: Pericles wearing a helmet pushed back on his head. A Roman copy of an earlier Greek original. The name is inscribed in Greek.
- Production date
- 2ndC
- Dimensions
-
Height: 58.42 centimetres
- $Inscriptions
-
- Curator's comments
- Cook 2013, nr. 245:
Townley's description; ‘A head bearing a helmet, and placed upon a Terminus, with the name of Pericles, thus inscribed upon it, ПΕΡΙΚΛΕΣ. The portrait of this great warrior and legislator was not known in these days, until this Terminus, and another similar to it , but of a more modern style of sculpture, were discovered 1780 at the pianella [sic, for Pianura] di Cassio before mentioned’ (TY 12/3, street drawing room 20). The inscription actually reads ΠΕΡΙΚΛΗΣ.
The discovery of a portrait of Pericles with the name inscribed in an excavation sponsored by Pope Pius VI in the ‘Oliveto’ at Tivoli was reported by Hamilton on 17 April 1779 (TY 7/630). Hamilton had himself found a similar piece at the lake of Castiglione (TY 7/632, 18 May 1779). He hoped to obtain one for Townley, and negotiations with Visconti dragged on to 1783. In the end, it was acquired by Volpato, who sold it to Hamilton for 200 Scudi, to which Hamilton added 12 Scudi for transport before charging Townley £50 (TY 7/660, 13 August 1783, cf. TY 10/3, fo. 36). On 10 January 1784 Hamilton, wrote that it had been found in the ‘Oliveto’ in the same cava as the copy in the Vatican (TY 7/622). This site was also sometimes described as the ‘Pianella di Cassio’ (TY 12/5, TY 12/19/1), but now more simply as the ‘Villa di Cassio’. On the site, which was excavated by Domenico de Angelis, see T. Ahby, ‘The Classical Topography of the Roman Campagna II’, PBSR 3 (1906), 191-2.
Date:
early Trajanic replica (Pandermalis); associated with Kresilas (Hinks, Fittschen, Muss and Schubert; queried by Lippold); Late Hellenistic lettering (Lawrence); seen by Pausanias (i.25.1, 28.2) on the Acropolis (Muss and Schubert).
Drawings:
*Townley drawing 2010,5006.160, annotated ‘Brown delt.’.
Bibliography:
- Pliny 34.74;
- Synopsis of the Contents of the British Museum (1808), III.32;
- Ancient Marbles of the British Museum, II, pl. 32;
- A. H. Smith, A Catalogue of Sculpture in the Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities, British Museum, Vol. I (London 1892), 288-9, no. 549;
- E. A. Gardner, Handbook of Greek Sculpture (London, 1896), 317, fig. 72;
- M. Collignon, Histoire de la Sculpture Grecque II (Paris, 1897), 133, fig. 63;
- J. J. Bernoulli, Griechische Ikonographie (Munich, 1901), 108, no. 1, pl. 10;
- G. H. Chase, Greek and Roman Sculpture in American Collections (Cambridge, Mass., 1924), 65, fig. 71;
- A. W. Lawrence, Classical Sculpture (London, 1929), 207, pl. 57b;
- G. M. A. Richter, The Sculpture and Sculptors of the Greeks (New Haven, 1929), 175-6, fig. 624 (19302), 233-5, fig. 624;
- E. G. Suhr, Sculptured Portraits of Greek Statesmen (Baltimore, 1931), 24, fig. 4;
- R. P. Hinks, Greek and Roman Portrait Sculpture (London, 1935), 5, pl. 1;
- G. Lippold, Die griechische Plastik. Handbuch der Archäologie III.1 (Munich, 1950), 172, note 11;
- G. M. A. Richter, Portraits of the Greeks, 3 vols. (London, 1965), I, 103, no. 3, figs. 429-31;
- C. Pietrangeli, Scavi e scoperte di antichità sotto il Pontificio di Pio Sesto (Rome, 1958), 174-5, no. 2;
- D. Pandermalis, Untersuchungen zu den klassischen Strategenköpfen (Freiburg i. Breisgau, 1969), 26;
- J. J. Pollitt, Art and Experience in Classical Greece (Cambridge, 1972), 100, 102, fig 45;
- E. Voutiras, Studien zu Interpretation und Stil griechischer Porträts des 5. und frühen 4. JHS (Bonn, 1980), 99;
- J. Boardman, Greek Sculpture: the Classical Period (London, 1985), 206, fig. 188;
- U. Muss and C. Schubert, Die Akropolis von Athen (Graz, 1988), 172 and fig. 100;
- A. M. Nielsen, ‘Det Graeske Ansigt’, in A.M. Nielsen (ed.), Ansigter (En Temabog, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, 1989), 28, fig. 26;
- R. Neudecker, Die Skulpturenausstattung römischer Villen in Italien (Mainz am Rhein, 1990), 232, no. 66.36 (bibl.);
- K. Fittschen et al., Verzeichnis der Gipsabgüsse des Archäologischen Instituts der Georg-August-Universität Göttingen (Göttingen, 1990), 132, A 594 (bibl.);
- T. Potts, Civilization: Ancient Treasures from the British Museum (Exhibition Catalogue, Canberra/Melbourne, 1990), 144-5, no. 70;
- The Treasures of the British Museum: Art and Man (Exhibition Catalogue, Tokyo, 1990), 125, no. 123;
- S. Walker, Greek and Roman Portraits (London, 1995), 8, fig. 1;
- P. Zanker, The Mask of Socrates. The Image of the Intellectual in Antiquity. Sather Classical Lectures, vol. 59 (Berkeley/Los Angeles, 1995). Also published as Die Maske des Sokrates. Das Bild des Intellektuellen in der antiken Kunst (Munich, 1995), 27, fig. 15;
- Corpus Inscriptionem Graecarum. III, 6095;
- Inscriptiones Graecae. XIV, 1191;
- Inscr. Italiae IV.1, 579.
- Location
- On display (G35/od)
- Exhibition history
-
Exhibited:
1990, 24 Mar-10 Jun, Australia, Canberra, National Gallery of Australia, Civilization: Ancient Treasures from the British Museum, cat. no.70
199,0 28 Jun-23 Sep, Australia, Melbourne, Museum of Victoria, Civilization: Ancient Treasures from the British Museum, cat. no.70
1990, 20 Oct-9 Dec, Japan, Tokyo, Setagaya Art Museum, Treasures of the British Museum, cat. no.123
1991, 5 Jan-20 Feb, Japan, Yamaguchi, Prefectural Museum of Art, Treasures of the British Museum, cat. no.123
1991, 9 Mar-7 May, Japan, Osaka, National Museum of Art, Treasures of the British Museum, cat. no.123
2006-2007, 16 Nov-11 Feb, London, BM, The Past from Above
2023 4 May - 13 Aug, London, BM, G35, Luxury and Power: Persia to Greece
- Acquisition date
- 1805
- Department
- Greek and Roman
- Registration number
- 1805,0703.91
