Marble head of a Hellenistic ruler

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Copy or adaptation of a Greek portrait of the early 3rd century B.C. The flat fillet worn by this young man is an insignium of kingship. He has been identified as one of the Macedonian Greek kings who ruled the new kingdoms formed in the lands that Alexander the Great had conquered in the late fourth century B.C. The head was once part of the collection of antiquities formed in the early seventeenth century in Rome by the Marchese Vincenzo Giustiniani.

Greek and Roman Art

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Museum's collection of Greek and Roman art comprises more than thirty thousand works ranging in date from the Neolithic period (ca. 4500 B.C.) to the time of the Roman emperor Constantine's conversion to Christianity in A.D. 312. It includes the art of many cultures and is among the most comprehensive in North America. The geographic regions represented are Greece and Italy, but not as delimited by modern political frontiers: Greek colonies were established around the Mediterranean basin and on the shores of the Black Sea, and Cyprus became increasingly Hellenized. For Roman art, the geographical limits coincide with the expansion of the Roman Empire. The department also exhibits the art of prehistoric Greece (Helladic, Cycladic, and Minoan) and pre-Roman art of Italic peoples, notably the Etruscans.

Metropolitan Museum of Art