Portrait of Alexander, on a modern bust

Roman art

In this sculpture, the figure’s head is turned to the right, his eyes looking upward, and he is crowned with a thick head of wavy locks styled up and off his forehead in what is called an anastole. The work is a portrait of Alexander the Great in the guise of a hero, a type attested in numerous replicas and emphasised in the Borghese sculpture, which dates to between the first and second centuries CE, by the figure’s decisive, passionate air.

Object details

Commentary

This head, which is set on a modern bust, is tilted and turned to the right, with clear tension in the neck muscles. The face is marked by full, soft features, with large eyes emphasised by slightly swollen eyelids and full, partially open lips. The thick locks of hair on top of the head, brushed backward, are missing their ends; on the sides, the hair reveals the ears and comes down over the neck in serpentine locks. Four tufts of hair fall over the forehead. The two in the middle are turned to the left and one of them folds up and over itself to create an anastole.

In 1832, Nibby reported that the sculpture was in the second room and identified it as a portrait of Alexander the Great, also noting a modern inscription: Alex(ander) M)agnus), which was evidently added when the sculpture was restored (p. 75). Later, Venturi described it as a ‘bust of a young man, possibly Alexander’ and Arndt more generically labelled it a portrait of a Greek man with features similar to Alexander (1893, p. 27; 1891, p. 19, nos 331–332). L’Orange held that the upward orientation of the head and the intensity of the gaze were evidence of a Hellenistic origin, the facial features reminiscent of those of a Ptolemaic prince and compared the Borghese exemplar with a colossal portrait unearthed in Egypt and now in the Louvre (1947, p. 43, fig. 23). In 1957, Calza revived the link between the portrait and the iconographic type of Alexander the Great (p. 9, no. 46). 

According to Moreno, the facial features can be traced to the iconography of the Macedonian king, noting in particular the emphatic torsion of the head backwards and to the side, which is a typical heroic pose, as well as the thick locks of hair and their arrangement up and away from the forehead. This interpretation was accepted by Marcelloni, who considered the sculpture to belong to a type characterised by the division of the hair into four tufts on the forehead. This category includes the colossal head from Tarsus now in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek (Bieber 1964, p. 73, figs 92–93), the Campana torso in the Louvre (Bernoulli, 1905, pp. 75–77, fig. 18), the marble sculpture at the Capitoline (Bieber 1964, pp. 70–71, figs 90–91) and the portrait at the Museum of Fine Arts (Bieber 1964, p. 76, figs 107–108).

Marcelloni rightly considered the Borghese exemplar one of the finest portraits of the Alexander the Great and dated it to the end of first and beginning of the second century CE (1995, pp. 160–161).

Giulia Ciccarello