Head of Sappho

Sappho lived on the island of Lesbos around 600 BC, and her poems were still read long after her death. What she looked like, nobody recorded. When the Athenian sculptor Silanion made a bronze statue of her some two and a half centuries later, he had to imagine her face.

The museum thinks this marble head probably goes back to that statue. It is a Roman copy, and scholars group it with other heads of the same type. Both steps, that the woman is Sappho and that the model was Silanion's, are probable, and neither has been proven.

Silanion's bronze is known because of a trial. In 70 BC the Roman orator Cicero prosecuted Gaius Verres, who had governed Sicily for three years, and among the works he accused Verres of carrying off from the island was this Sappho, taken from the town hall of Syracuse. Verres left the base behind, Cicero said, and the Greek verses cut into it went on naming a statue that was no longer there.