Greek female head, 6th century BC.
Marble.
Provenance: Private collection of Columbia University economics professor Vladimir Gregorievitch Simkhovitch (1874-1959), USA. Vladimir was a great collector of ancient art and works from his collection are preserved in the Smithsonian Musuem, the Metropolitan Museum, NY or the Brooklyn Museum, among others.
Publications: Ancient art from the V.G. Simkhovitch collection, Wolf Rudolph and Adriana Calinescu, Indiana University Art Museum. 1998. Page 42.
In good condition.
Measurements: 12.5 cm high; 19 cm high with stand.
Greek head from the Archaic period, made in half-bulk terracotta. It represents a beardless man, with uniform hair and a kind face, with a sketched smile, typical of this period.
The Archaic period of Greek sculpture is characterised by solemn art and a clear conceptual idealisation, different from the balanced naturalism of the Classical period. It was also a time when Greek sculpture drew on Asian and Egyptian influences, achieving an art of great formal complexity and aesthetic quality from an almost aniconic culture. However, by this period the human figure was already the protagonist of Greek sculpture, although the aim was not to represent the human body but to capture an ideal, whether divinities or concepts, in material form. Hence the hieratic representations, more divine than earthly, with a simple modelling that does not go into superfluous detail, based on geometry and symbolic conventions, such as the type of smile we see in this terracotta.