Head of Demosthenes
Unknown (Roman copy after Polyeuktos) (Polyeuktos active c. 280 BC) · 150-200 AD (?)
The furrowed brow, sunken cheeks and tightly pressed lips belong to Demosthenes, the Athenian orator who spent his life warning his city against Philip of Macedon. Short curls cling to the skull and a close beard frames a face that looks anxious rather than heroic, one of the first Greek portraits to show a statesman's inner strain. Look closely and you can see old repairs: the tip of the nose, the chin and the back of the head were remade in marble long ago, and the bust below was recut.
The image goes back to a bronze statue by Polyeuktos set up in the Athenian Agora around two hundred and eighty BC, more than forty years after Demosthenes took poison rather than surrender to the Macedonians. That bronze is lost, but Roman workshops copied it many times, and this head was probably carved in Italy in the second half of the second century AD. It entered the Louvre in 1801, among the works seized in Italy during the Napoleonic campaigns. Compare the tense mouth with the calm faces of gods elsewhere in these rooms.
Did You Know? Demosthenes was said to have practised speaking with pebbles in his mouth to cure a stammer, and the tight lips of his portrait became his trademark.
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