Veiled female head

Less than life-sized and resting on a long, slender neck that is broken at the base, the head is of a young woman with harmonious features and a dreamy, detached expression. The rounded oval face with rounded chin has full cheeks, broad cheekbones and a smooth triangular forehead whose profile is continued in the line of the nose, which presents a sharp ridge and fleshy wings with an incised outline. The slightly arched eyebrows join up with the root of the nose. The eyes are narrow and elongated with a deep inner canthus. The upper eyelid is ribbon-like and the lower narrow and adherent to the eyeball. The mouth is small and fleshy with the philtrum marked by a shallow groove. The upper lip is wavy and the lower protruding and separated from the chin by a pronounced depression. The face is framed by a substantial mass of hair parted in the middle and combed back in two bands of wavy locks, distinguished by grooves of varying depth, which leave the ears partially bare. These are summarily fashioned with holes piercing the lobes. The rest of the hair is covered by a veil of thick material marked on the outside by a few angular folds and on the inside by schematic grooves made with a chisel. Small holes can be seen a short distance from the top edge of the veil, one by the right temple, one at the parting of the hair and two, still containing the remains of metal pins, at the left temple. Between the wavy edge of the veil and the hair is a narrow strip with a rough surface equal in width to the forehead. The slight turn and inclination of the head to the right generates somewhat evident asymmetries in the portrayal of the features, so that on the right side the cheek appears flatter and more developed in depth, the eye more elongated and in a lower position, and the hair thicker. The formal rendering of the sculpture, carved exclusively by means of the chisel, marks it unmistakeably as a Greek original produced by a fairly skilful artist capable of bringing the marble to life by means of sophisticated and sensitive moulding deftly developed through the contrast between the warm colourism of the hair, handled with uninhibited naturalness, and the pictorialism of the flesh, whose glowing surfaces are animated by almost imperceptible undulations in the nasolabial and ocular regions. The mass of locks is clearly separated from the planes of the face, whose delicate modulation eschews linear definition of the features so that they appear indistinct. The blurring of the features, the depth of the inner canthus of the eyes and the slight inclination all give the face a tone of veiled pathos. The hairstyle, with the hair parted in the middle into two symmetrical bands gathered together in a bunch on the back of the head, was codified in the second half of the 5th century BC in statues of divinities produced by masters of the school of Phidias, which have reached us as originals or more often through Roman copies. 1 The last few decades of the century saw the adoption of this hairstyle in the sculpture of the various regions of the Greek world and in funerary sculpture, in the round and in relief, where it was used for images of deceased women, often veiled in such a way that only the soft, wavy locks on either side of the forehead remain visible. A hairstyle of wavy bands that emerge from a veil to form a thick crown around the face also characterizes numerous heads from the necropolis of Cyrene belonging to busts or half-length statues of a female divinity that can probably be identified as Persephone. 7 Particular variations on this type of hairstyle are found in sculptures from Taranto of terracotta and marble, which offer a vigorous interpretation accentuating the volume of the frontal bands. This can be seen in a series of clay heads produced from the end of the 5th century BC 9 and in a terracotta head of the first half of 4th century BC distinguished by its monumental character and precise workmanship, which is of particular interest in relation to our sculpture. The head is in fact crowned with a semi-cylindrical diadem decorated with plant volutes beside two juxtaposed cusps, which finds a significant parallel in a gold diadem of the first quarter of the century 4th BC from a grave in Crispiano. 11 It is highly probable that the head under examination here wore a metal diadem of this kind, which could have set on the strip with a rough surface between the hair and the top edge of the veil. It is hard to say whether the holes for pegs along the edge of the veil were connected in some way with the diadem or served for the attachment of further decorative elements. The holes in the earlobes were certainly for earrings, again probably made of metal. The soft handling of the flesh with rich chiaroscuro, the gentle modulation of the surfaces in the area of the mouth and around the eyes, and the firm fullness of forms that characterize head are typical stylistic and formal features of marble sculpture from Taranto. A fine example is provided by a veiled female head from the mid-4th century BC in the Museum of Kansas City, which differs from ours, however, in the more solid structure of the face and more precise definition of the crisply delineated contours. The Taranto sculpture, from the period spanning the late 4th and early 3rd century BC, resembles the one under examination in its expressive hint of pathos and soft blurring derived from the Praxitelean tradition, a prelude to the almost complete dissolving of linear accents In the light of the above considerations, it appears reasonable to assign the sculpture to the closing decades of the 4th century BC. Its state of preservation and the lack of information about its context of discovery make it impossible to identify the subject represented. While we cannot rule out the possibility that the head belonged to a funerary statue, the preciousness of the metal inserts and the probable presence of a diadem would rather suggest a votive statue of a youthful divinity such as Kore-Persephone or more probably Aphrodite.