Head of Orpheus

Orpheus, the son of Apollo and a muse, charmed or soothed gods, people, and even stones with his melodious voice and lyre. His wife Eurydice was fatally bitten by a snake. Sick with grief over her death, Orpheus descended to Hades to find her. Seduced by his song, the god Pluto gave him permission to retrieve Eurydice on the condition that he not look back at her during their journey to the upper world. Unable to resist, Orpheus peeked at his bride and she slipped back into blackness, lost to him forever. This heroic, sharply stylized head is excerpted from the twenty-six-foot central figure of the "Orpheus Fountain," installed in 1936 in front of the Stockholm Concert Hall in Milles’s native Sweden. In that version, Orpheus plays his lyre as he towers above eight figures awakening to his divine music. The Museum’s head, excised from its original context, alludes to Orpheus’s unfortunate demise—he was torn limb from limb by a group of maenads and his severed head floated off toward Lesbos, the island of female poets.