This head of a youth wearing a fillet (band) must have belonged to the statue of a victorious athlete. He probably rested one arm lightly on his head; the remains of a rectangular support can still be seen among his curls. Roman copies often conformed to contemporary taste, and the contrast between polished flesh and deeply drilled hair on this head would have held special appeal for clients in the second century A.D.
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Artwork Details
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Title:Marble head of an athlete
Period:Mid-Imperial, Antonine
Date:ca. 138–192 CE
Culture:Roman
Medium:Marble
Dimensions:H. 13 1/2 in. (34.3 cm)
Classification:Stone Sculpture
Credit Line:Rogers Fund, 1911
Accession Number:11.210.2
Robinson, Edward. 1912. "Head of a Greek Athlete." Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 7(3): pp. 43, 47–49.
Richter, Gisela M. A. 1917. Handbook of the Classical Collection. p. 215, fig. 130, New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Richter, Gisela M. A. 1927. Handbook of the Classical Collection. pp. 252–53, fig. 177, New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Richter, Gisela M. A. 1930. Handbook of the Classical Collection. pp. 252–53, fig. 177, New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Metropolitan Museum of Art. 1936[1934]. A Guide to the Collections, Part 1: Ancient and Oriental Art, 2nd edn. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Richter, Gisela M. A. 1950. The Sculpture and Sculptors of the Greeks, 3rd edn. pp. 79, 412, fig. 195, New Haven: Yale University Press.
Richter, Gisela M. A. 1953. Handbook of the Greek Collection. pp. 90, 231, pl. 71a, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Richter, Gisela M. A. 1954. Catalogue of Greek Sculptures. no. 45, p. 34, pl. 41, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
von Bothmer, Dietrich. 1978. Antichnoe iskusstvo iz muzeia Metropoliten, Soedinennye Shtaty Ameriki: Katalog vystavki. no. 47, Moscow: Sovetskii Khudozhnik.
Metropolitan Museum of Art. 1987. Greece and Rome. no. 46, pp. 65, New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Bol, Renate. 1998. Amazones Volneratae: Untersuchungen ze den Ephesischen Amazonenstauen. III.16.4, Mainz am Rhein: Verlag Philipp von Zabern.
Milleker, Elizabeth J. 2003. Light on Stone: Greek and Roman Sculpture in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a Photographic Essay. pp. 97–98, pl. 22, New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Zanker, Paul, Seán Hemingway, Christopher S. Lightfoot, and Joan R. Mertens. 2019. Roman Art : A Guide through the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Collection. no. 3, pp. 42–43, New York: Scala Publishers.
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The Museum's collection of Greek and Roman art comprises more than 30,000 works ranging in date from the Neolithic period to the time of the Roman emperor Constantine's conversion to Christianity in A.D. 312.
