Head of Perikles
Portrait of the Athenian politician.
Perikles, who died 429 BCE, led the democracy of Athens at the height of the city’s power and influence. Athenian military domination of much of the Greek world funded a programme of renewal of the principal religious and civic buildings of Athens. The crowning glory was the Parthenon, built on the Acropolis between 447 and 432 BCE.
This is a Roman copy of an original portrait which was perhaps created in the lifetime of Perikles or soon after. However it probably bears little resemblance to his actual appearance, showing an ideal type of the mature soldier citizen, wearing a helmet pushed back on his head.
The shoulders are shaped for mounting on a square shaft of stone, as was common at the time
London, British Museum 549
Purchased in 1884 from Brucciani of London
Lippold: Griechische Plastik, 172 (n.11)
Bernoulli: Griechischische Ikonographie (1901) I, 110, pl. X
Smith: Catalogue of British Museum Sculpture I (1892), 289
Walston: Catalogue of Casts in the Museum of Classical Archaeology (1889), 114, no.599
Reporter: 19 June 1885, 895, no.549
Inscription: IG XIV, 1191
Richter: The Portraits of the Greeks, 175, & pl.137
Tracey, S: Pericles, A Sourcebook and Reader (2009), 37-8, fig.3
Jenkins: Greek Architecture and its Sculpture, 71, fig.58
Burn: Greek and Roman Art (1991), 60
Dillon: Ancient Greek Portrait Sculpture (2006), 52
PERIKLES
Found in 1781 in the Villa of Cassius at Tivoli. Later in the Townley Collection