NO RESERVE: AN OVER LIFE SIZED TERRACOTTA HEAD OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT

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NO RESERVE: AN OVER LIFE SIZED TERRACOTTA HEAD OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT Modelled in the round and of over life-size scale, the head turned slightly to the proper right and tilted upward, the face broad and fleshy with heavy-lidded almond eyes beneath strongly arched brows, a straight nose with defined nostrils, and full parted lips above a rounded chin. The hair rises from the forehead in the distinctive anastole, a central upsweep of thick curls parted in the manner long associated with portraits of Alexander, falling in deeply undercut locks to either side of the face and continuing in heavy tresses down the nape. The surface retains extensive traces of a white ground or slip, now flaking to reveal the warm brown terracotta body beneath, the break at the neck rough and unfinished, suggesting the head was made for insertion into a separately worked body or architectural setting. The iconography is unambiguous. The upward turn of the head, the leonine mane of hair with its central anastole, the parted lips and the moist, upward-gazing eyes are the codified features of Alexander portraiture established by Lysippos in the fourth century B.C. and endlessly repeated across the Hellenistic and Roman worlds. The type carried a specific political and religious charge, the pothos or divine longing of the conqueror, and was adopted by successor rulers, by Roman emperors from Pompey to Caracalla, and by private patrons who wished to associate themselves with the memory of the Macedonian king. Whether the present head was intended as a portrait of Alexander proper, or of a later ruler assimilated to his image, or as a purely idealising evocation of the type, the visual language is the same. Terracotta was a working material of great importance in the Hellenistic and Roman worlds for sculpture of this ambition, particularly where marble was costly or unavailable. Large-scale terracotta heads and figures were produced across the eastern Mediterranean, in Asia Minor, in Magna Graecia and in the workshops of the Italian peninsula, often coated with a white ground to receive polychromy in imitation of marble. The white residues visible across the present head are consistent with such a preparation. The scale, the confident modelling of the hair in deep, plastic curls, and the direct handling of the fleshy features place the work within the tradition of ambitious architectural or votive terracotta sculpture rather than the smaller domestic figurines more commonly encountered. This head exemplifies the long afterlife of the Lysippan Alexander type in monumental terracotta, a medium in which the sculptor could achieve scale and expressive plasticity without the expense of marble. The frank modelling of the features and the emphatic treatment of the hair place it firmly within the visual rhetoric of Hellenistic ruler portraiture as it was received and repeated in later workshops. Dimensions: Height: 50cm

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