Greek portrait, 4th century BC.

Portrait of a young man. Greece, late Classical-early Hellenistic period, 4th century BC.
Marble.
Provenance: private collection of Nicolas Koutolakis (1919-1966) Paris and Geneva.
In good state of preservation.
Measurements: 20.4 cm.
Greek head, carved in marble round bulk, portraying a young man with a rounded face, big eyes and a half-open mouth, in a concentrated attitude. The hair is depicted with undulating parallel incisions. The delicate work of the marble worker, who has painstakingly detailed the identifying features of the young man, is remarkable. It is likely that this head formed a complete sculpture of a child that acted as an ex-voto.
Hellenistic sculpture represents the final period in the evolution of Greek sculpture, and developed in the period between the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC and the conquest of Egypt by the Romans between 30-31 BC. It is an eclectic, secular and historicist language, which takes as its starting point the legacy of classical sculpture from the previous period, to which new oriental influences were added. It also involved a refinement of the representation of human anatomy and emotional expressiveness, as well as a fundamental change in aesthetics, moving away from the ideal to represent the individual, from the generic to the specific.