| Arundel Head | |
|---|---|
 Arundel Head in the British Museum | |
| Material | Bronze |
| Size | 29.5 cm high |
| Created | 2nd-1st Century BC |
| Present location | British Museum, London |
| Registration | GR 1760.9-19.1 (Bronze 847) |
The Arundel Head is a Hellenistic bronze portrait of a dramatist or king from Asia Minor, now kept in the British Museum. Dating to the 2nd-1st centuries BC, the head once belonged to (and takes its name from) the famous English collector of classical antiquities, Thomas Howard, 21st Earl of Arundel. [1]
The head is all that remains of a life-size bronze statue. The artist has realistically conveyed the worn features of an old man, including a wrinkled forehead, almond-shaped eyes and pouting mouth, which gives the portrait an air of power and authority. The hair of this bronze masterpiece is tied down in a ribbon, which suggests it may have portrayed a poet. Once thought to represent the ancient Greek writer Homer, it is currently considered to personify either the ancient Greek playwright Sophocles or a Macedonian King.
Recent research has suggested that the Arundel Head may have originally been found in Smyrna, the ancient name for Izmir in Turkey. The bronze sculpture was brought to England from Constantinople in the early seventeenth century as part of the collection of Thomas Howard, 21st Earl of Arundel. Subsequently, it came into the possession of Dr Richard Mead and later Brownlow Cecil, 9th Earl of Exeter, who donated it to the British Museum in 1760, making it one of the earliest pieces of classical antiquities to enter the national collection. [2]
The British Museum is a public museum dedicated to human history, art and culture located in the Bloomsbury area of London. Its permanent collection of eight million works is the largest in the world. It documents the story of human culture from its beginnings to the present. The British Museum was the first public national museum to cover all fields of knowledge.
Salamis was an ancient Greek city-state on the east coast of Cyprus, at the mouth of the river Pedieos, 6 km north of modern Famagusta. According to tradition, the founder of Salamis was Teucer, son of Telamon, king of the Greek island of Salamis, who could not return home after the Trojan War because he had failed to avenge his brother Ajax.
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Thomas Howard, 14th Earl of Arundel KG, was an English peer, diplomat and courtier during the reigns of King James I and King Charles I, but he made his name as a Grand Tourist and art collector rather than as a politician. When he died he possessed 700 paintings, along with large collections of sculptures, books, prints, drawings, and antique jewellery. Most of his collection of marble carvings, known as the Arundel marbles, was eventually left to the University of Oxford.
The Arundel marbles are a collection of stone Roman and Ancient Greek sculptures and inscriptions collected by Thomas Howard, 21st Earl of Arundel in the early seventeenth century, the first such comprehensive collection of its kind in England. They are now in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, having been donated in two groups.
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An engraved gem, frequently referred to as an intaglio, is a small and usually semi-precious gemstone that has been carved, in the Western tradition normally with images or inscriptions only on one face. The engraving of gemstones was a major luxury art form in the Ancient world, and an important one in some later periods.
The "Marlborough gem" is a carved onyx cameo that depicts an initiation ceremony of Psyche and Eros. It is the most famous engraved gem in the extensive and prominent collection both inherited and expanded by George Spencer, 4th Duke of Marlborough. Since 1899 it has been in the collection of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, where it is described as a "cameo with the wedding of Cupid and Psyche, or an initiation rite", reflecting the view of its subject generally held until the last century.
The Sleeping Ariadne, housed in the Vatican Museums in Vatican City, is a Roman Hadrianic copy of a Hellenistic sculpture of the Pergamene school of the 2nd century BC, and is one of the most renowned sculptures of Antiquity. The reclining figure in a chiton bound under her breasts half lies, half sits, her extended legs crossed at the calves, her head pillowed on her left arm, her right thrown over her head. Other Roman copies of this model exist: one, the "Wilton House Ariadne", is substantially unrestored, while another, the "Medici Ariadne" found in Rome, has been "seriously reworked in modern times", according to Brunilde Sismondo Ridgway. Two surviving statuettes attest to a Roman trade in reductions of this familiar figure. A variant Sleeping Ariadne is in the Prado Museum, Madrid. A later Roman variant found in the Villa Borghese gardens, Rome, is at the Louvre Museum.
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The Bronze Head of Hypnos is a Roman copy of an ancient Greek statue found at Civitella d'Arna near Perugia in central Italy. Widely copied since its discovery in the early nineteenth century, it has been part of the British Museum's collection since 1868.
Denys Eyre Lankester Haynes was an English classical scholar, archaeologist, and museum curator, who specialised in the full range of classical archaeology. He was Keeper of Greek and Roman Antiquities at the British Museum between 1956 and 1976. He was additionally Geddes–Harrower Professor of Greek Art and Archaeology at the University of Aberdeen from 1972 to 1973, and, in retirement, visitor to the Ashmolean Museum from 1979 to 1987. He had served in military intelligence during the Second World War.
