Small Female Head

56 Small Female Head The face is somewhat battered, with most of the nose and lips missing. The area above the eyebrows is also scraped, as is the surface around the subject’s own left ear. The head is tilted on its neck toward its own right side. This small head appears to come from a draped figure of a Hellenistic type based on fourth century B.C. models and used, inter alia, for Muses. The hair is tied around the top of the head with two rudimentary fillets, one of which extends to tie up the bun at the back of the head. The face provides a very distant echo of the style of Skopas. An Aphrodite with a small Eros on her left arm, a late Hellenistic variant of the draped "Venus Genetrix" type, was found together with an inscribed base "To (the) Syrian Aphrodite," at the shrine of Ptoan Apollo in Boeotia; the head is in a class with this small example (Sotheby Sale, New York, 16 May, 1980, lot 264). The so-called "Daughter of Asklepios" of about 270 B.C. from the Asklepieion of Kos, in the Landesmuseum at Stuttgart, is turned in the opposite direction and looks more decidedly upward but gives a frame of reference for what is seen in this small head (Schefold, Cahn, 1960, pp. 470-471, no. VII 363). The Stuttgart head is perfectly preserved, enabling us to visualize the early Hellenistic characteristics surviving, albeit with the wounds of time, in the Norton head. Cornelius Vermeule and Amy Brauer