Ancient Greek Portrait Sculpture: Contexts, Subjects, and Styles

Description

This book offers a new approach to the history of Greek portraiture by focusing on portraits without names. Sheila Dillon considers the few original bronze and marble portrait statues preserved from the Classical and Hellenistic periods together with the large number of Greek portraits known only through Roman copies. This study calls into question two basic tenets of Greek portraiture: first, that it was only in the late Hellenistic period, under Roman influence, that Greek portraits exhibited a wide range of styles, including descriptive realism; and second, that in most cases, one can easily tell a subject's public role from the visual traits used in this portrait. The sculptures studied here instead show that the proliferation of portrait styles takes place much earlier, in the late Classical period, and that the identity expressed by these portraits is much more complex and layered than has previously been realized.

Sheila Dillon is Associate Professor in the Department of Art, Art History and Visual Studies at Duke University, with a secondary appointment in the Department of Classical Studies. She is the author of The Female Portrait Statue in the Greek World (2010) and co-editor of A Companion to Women in the Ancient World (2012).

"A great virtue of Dillon's study is her attention to bot the Greek setting of the original images and the display of busts and herms, and more rarely full statues of these past men of action or thought in Roman villas and gardens." -Barbara Tsakirgis, Vanderbilt University "Portrait Sculpture. Context, Subjects, and Styles... is a great book. ...[I]t is hard to do justice to the many issues that it raises. All the more reason, I think, to use the volume in your next seminar on Greek and Roman portraiture." -Peter Schultz, Concordia College, Bryn Mawr Classical Review