Image: Portrait of Alexander. Marble with painting and gilding. H. 18.5 cm., c. third century BC. Princeton University Art Museum, inv. 2008.330. 

Associate Professor of Art History Mark Abbe will present the lecture “Recontextualizing a gilded marble portrait of Alexander the Great from Egypt ”

Lecture Abstract

“Recontextualizing a gilded marble portrait of Alexander the Great from Egypt” 

It is increasingly recognized that the practices of extensively gilding bronze and marble statuary developed in the Hellenistic Greek world (c. late 4th-1st centuries BC), long before they became more widespread in Roman antiquity. However, the very fragmentary remains of such gilding and the original meanings of these rare practices in Greek art and visual culture have only begun to be systematically explored. This presentation reexamines the early history of gilding portrait statuary in Greece and then distills technical investigations into a unique early example of such polychromy fortuitously preserved on a marble portrait head of Alexander the Great from the site of Hermopolis Magna in Ptolemaic Egypt. The little-noted origins of this head reward investigation and allow the multiple, complex resonances of such gilding on royal portraits in the Hellenistic world to be explored in a specific historical and cultural context.