Bronze portrait of a man

Bronze portrait of a man

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The bronze head was discovered on August 11, 1904 near the Arch of Augustus at Susa, a town in northern Italy, not far from Turin, together with some small fragments of one or more bronze statues and a fragment of a marble inscription belonging to an honorific statue. The statue had been donated for Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa (63–12 B.C.), one of Octavian's (later Augustus) closest friends and supporters, by a member of the Cottii family, but nothing suggests that the bronze head and the inscription belong together. Traditionally, the head has been identified as Agrippa, although it cannot be related to Agrippa’s normal portrait type. Nevertheless, the head clearly belonged to an impressive, full-length statue of a high-ranking Roman.

Greek and Roman Art

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

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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.