Literature

Alexander the Great was a king of the ancient Greek kingdom of Macedon, located in northern Greece and adjacent countries. In the eleven years between his crossing of the Hellespont in the spring of 334 BC and his death in Babylon on 10 June 323 BC, Alexander changed the face of the ancient world forever. His march, the longest military campaign in human history, simultaneously conquered the Persian empire and pushed the frontiers of Graeco-Macedonian civilisation across the borders of India. He founded more than seventy cities, creating an empire that stretched across three continents and covered about two million square miles.

In addition to his military might, Alexander revitalised the visual arts. He understood and exploited the propagandistic powers of portraiture; with the types he created inspiring new traditions in the representations of royalty, gods, and heroes. Alexander developed a distinctive genre of ruler portraiture that continued to be adopted throughout the Hellenistic period after this death.

This portrait of Alexander is closest to the so-called 'Erbach' type. The type is named after the head found in 1791 at Hadrian's Villa, Tivoli, now in Schloss Erbach, Germany (inv. no. 642). It is also sometimes referred to as the 'Acropolis-Erbach' type due to the similarity to the head from the Acropolis (inv. no. Ακρ. 1331). The portraiture of this type is characterised by a very youthful appearance as they represent the earliest surviving portraits of the Alexander. For example, the Acropolis head is thought to be an original work of the Athenian sculptor Leochares, made circa 340 - 330 BC, perhaps after the Battle of Chaeronea when Alexander visited Athens at the age of 18. The thick curls and anastole represented here are also prominent features of the ruler. There is a similar scale Alexander, dated to the late Ptolemaic to Roman period, originally from Egypt and now in the Brooklyn Museum: acc. no. 54.162.