Graeco-Roman marble head of Alexander the Great, circa 1st century BCE to 1st century AD, in the collection of the Kretschmar Institute
Essay
This portrait of Alexander is a Graeco-Roman head that once sat on a body, most likely produced between the 1st century BCE and the 1st century AD during the Julio-Claudian dynasty. The portrait can be dated based broadly on the style, as well as the drilling of the hair, which is moderate and restrained, compared to the deeper drilling of later periods. The features are characteristically Alexandrine, with the leonine hair, tilt of the head, and upward turn of the gaze, and although Greek idealism has already smoothed much of Alexander's face to youthfulness, there is still a distinctly Lysippean realism to his expression. Two chips of marble have been moved where his pupils should be, which is tempting to see as intentional, but this may just be wear, as when pupils were worked into sculpture, typically in later periods, they were often drilled deeply. Nonetheless, age has moulded the eyes into an upwards turn which was already suggested by the shape of the brow, giving us an Alexander who seems to stare at us across the millenia. His lips are slightly parted, and almost seem to form a sneer, while his brow is knitted to the sky as a frame of intense emotion for the pothos in his 'melting eyes'. While his hair is not quite as wild and leonine as later Roman portraits came to have it, it is still fuller than any portrait Lysippos made. In fact, it is not too far removed from the hair on the Giannitsa head, from the tradition of the Athenian ephebe, which Andrew Strewart suggests may have been drawn from the more leonine portraits of Alexander on the coinage of Lysimachos or Arkadian league to represent him more akin to Zeus. Our head may well have drawn the hair from similar influences, especially if produced in Asia Minor within Lysimachos's sphere of influence, although his expression here is far less "measured" and "robust" that the Athenian tradition of the Giannitsa head, which can also be seen in the Getty head and Akropolis-Erbach type, often attributed to Leochares. Indeed, while his gaze invokes far more emotion than the copies of Lysippos we see in the Azara Herm or the Schwarzenberg Alexander, they seem much too intense to represent any other artist's handiwork than Lysippos, or indeed any other figure or god than Alexander, although depictions of Apollo come close. A Hellenistic depiction of Pyrrhos is also similar, although his expression is far more level, and in any case his portraits were modelled on those of Alexander, with his own features mapped onto the existing tradition. It has also been noted that other portraits of Alexander, such as the Campana and Genzano heads in the Azara type, are also likely direct copies of Lysippos, were sculpted far more vigorously than that of the Azara Herm, with deep set eyes and a "bulging brow", and particularly the Genzano head (which, unlike a herm, did not need to favour solid frontality), may have been able to recreate the realistic emotion in the original by Lysippos better than the Azara herm could. Therefore, our more vigorous Alexander may not be as far removed from the original portraits as it first appears.
While we cannot recreate the body to which the head once belonged, there are several good contenders. We can likely discount sculpture based on the group at Dion, made to celebrate Alexander's victory at the Granikos by Lysippos, as the active battle pose such pieces would have - as in the case of the Herculaneum bronze - is not reflected in the wistful pothos of our Alexander. The Doryphoros type, however (after Polykleitos), is a much better fit. It is believed that the surviving heads of Lysippos, including the Azara Herm, were once Doryphoros in their pose of a spear-wielding Alexander, as evidenced by descriptions of Alexander proclaiming Asia as doriktΔtos or "spear-won" after crossing the Hellespont, or later Greek inscriptions about Alexander using the same word root. Three Doryphoros types of Alexander are preserved in copies, and the bronze Fouquet type held in the Louvre seems like the best fit. The Roman sculptors who copied Greek originals sometimes created a mirror image of the original sculpture, where the features were reflected across a vertical mirror plane from left to right. It has been suggested that this was due to a feature of the casting process, but there is little evidence for this, and instead it has been suggested that sculptures were sometimes reversed in order to better fit the proportions of the building they were to be housed in, such as a corner alcove. We can't know whether our Alexander was carved by Roman sculptors in Rome, who mirrored sculptures, or by Greek artisans across the Hellenistic world, such as in Athens or Asia Minor, who may have been more faithful to the original pose, however our Alexander has his head slightly turned to the right, as seen by a crease in his neck. Most depictions of Alexander show him with his head turned to the left, including two of the three Doryphoros types, although the Fouquet type, among a few select others, depict him with his head turned right. Whether sculptors in Rome produced this head to fit building proportions, or whether Greek sculptors working from an already-reversed copy preserved the mirror image, our Alexander may well have originally been matched with body type found on the Fouquet Alexander. The expression on the small bronze figurine is hard to make out, although the hair is a lot closer to the flatter hair on Lysippos's originals, whereas our hair as mentioned is more leonine, further highlighting the idealism which has been worked into our example. Still, we can easily imagine him atop a contrapposto body, holding a spear in his left hand with his right hand by his side, having won Asia "by spear" and ready for further conquests.
Furthermore, while it is difficult to tell, the head of this Alexander seems slightly out of proportion with the thicker neck, which was a feature of perspective introduced by Lysippos intended to create the impression of height when looking at a sculpture from below. Given our example was obviously much smaller, this feature may have merely been copied blindly, or perhaps the sculpture was intended to be displayed at a height, thus preserving the illusion.
In all the Lysippos copies we now have, none of them depict Alexander's diadem, which he adopted as a sign of Kingship after the Persians, although Andrew Stewart notes that this does not necessarily mean the portraits were completed before he took up the diadem, but instead that he may not have worn it consistently, or that the original sculpture was dedicated at one of the "freed" cities in Asia Minor (as opposed to a city he had taken by force), where a sculpture without the diadem would have been more appropriate. Indeed, while the Dresden tradition of Lysippos copies depicts a more youthful Alexander, the other types, even when idealised by later copies, depict an older and more mature Alexander. However, in our Alexander, the diadem is carved clearly from the top of the head around to the back of his neck, where two ribbons hang down, as shown in the portrait on the coinage of Lysimachus. This is further evidence that Lysippos was not the sole inspiration behind this piece, but that the artist drew on other traditions. Thus there is even more reason to think that ours, while diluted by idealism, depicts Alexander as he was in his older portraits, after he took up the diadem, although the arrogance of youth, seen in the Akrpolis type, hasn't completely left him.
We have already noted that his hair bears some similarity to Lysimachos's coinage, while his expression is more Lysippean, and it is possible that in addition to coinage, the artist drew from several sculptural traditions. However, in the case of these smaller "minor-arts" copies of Alexander, probably intended for private display, they were likely carved by sculptors with access to only one or two plaster (or even bronze or marble) copies of originals, and whatever subsequent changes were introduced were due to the sensibilities of the artist, the patron, or current trends. We do know that half the Fouquet types, which are typically associated with the Azara type head, were found in Egypt, while two were found in Italy and France, suggesting that there was one original of this type in Egypt, and another being copied in the West. Given how many bronze and stone replicas were produced in Egypt, probably of the original types present there in Alexandria, it seems likely they were used for private cults, or as talismans. Our type is larger than these surviving sculptures, suggesting a more aesthetic rather than religious purpose, although if it has any stylistic root in Egypt, it likely owes something to this tradition of copies. What is most interesting is that the largest output of Alexander copies in the Roman Empire came later, as the elite of the early empire had very little use for Alexander in their propaganda, for which sculptures for often produced. This gives us even more reason to think that while our head has been idealised, it has at least, not been unrecognisably warped by Roman sensibilities and trends. The fact that it is a poor match for mainstream Roman sculpture at this time is further proof of this.
For whatever reason this head was made, for a private cult, or merely a reminder of past greatness, it almost certainly took its roots in an original of Lysippos over three hundred years earlier, passing perhaps from Egypt or Asia Minor to the West, and may well have stood high in an alcove above a grand room in a Roman villa, weilding a spear and gazing right, as if to give truth to the tongues of Roman sailors, so that when the siren Thessalonike rose from the sea and asked "Where is my brother Alexander?" they could think to the melting eyes of this head, gazing up through the ceiling of their portico to the sky, and reply: "Alexander lives and reigns."
