A Monumental Marble Head of Zeus, Early Roman Imperial, circa early 1st Century A.D.

with full beard of deeply drilled unruly curls, long moustache, full parted lips, fragmentary broad straight nose, large deep-set eyes drilled at the inner corners, and furrowed brow, the back carved flat and configured for insertion into an acrolithic statue.

discovered in Béziers, France, in the 1870's
Louis Noguier (d. 1905), Béziers
private collection, Béziers, 1920s
by descent to the present owner

 

Louis Noguier, "Chronique archéologique," in Bulletin de la société archéologique de Béziers, 2ème série, vol. XI, 1881, pp. 130-131, pl. D2
Bulletin de la société archéologique de Béziers, 1882, p. 297
Ernest Roschach, Histoire graphique de l'ancienne province de Languedoc, Toulouse, 1904, p. 201, fig. 110 (engraving)
Émile Bonnet, Antiquités et monuments du département de l'Hérault, Montpellier, 1905 [repr. Marseille, 1980], p. 180
Émile Bonnet, Carte archéologique de la Gaule romaine (FOR, vol. X, Hérault), p. 39 (15)
Émile Espérandieu, Recueil général des bas-reliefs, statues et bustes de la Gaule romaine, vol. 9, Paris, 1925, p. 178, no. 6869, illus.
Monique Clavel, Béziers et son territoire dans l'antiquité (Centre de recherches d'histoire ancienne, vol. 2), Paris, 1970, pp. 518-519, fig. 69
Jean Charles Balty and Daniel Cazes, Portraits impériaux de Béziers. Le groupe statuaire du forum, Toulouse, 1995, p. 123, and note 283

As shown and described, nose partially restored in plaster
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This majestic head was discovered "a few years before" 1881 in the basement of an almshouse, the Bureau de Bienfaisance (or Maison de la Charité), on the rue Flourens in Béziers. In the first publication of the head local antiquarian Louis Noguier writes, "The style is excellent, and ancient statuary has left nothing better in the region. The modeling is thick and powerful, and the beard as well as the long hair on the left side are very skillfully detailed. The brow, which is quite prominent, and the highly pronounced lips combine to give his physiognomy such an expression of grandeur and nobility that one can only see in him the father or master of heaven (Noguier, op. cit., 1881, pp. 130-131)." In 1882 the head is recorded as being in the cabinet des antiques of Louis Noguier himself in Béziers.

The recorded location of the find lies very close to the forum of the ancient Roman city, Colonia Urbs Julia Septimanorum Baeterrae, which underlies the modern town of Béziers. A famous group of Julio-Claudian portraits, originally displayed in a  basilica or temple on the forum, was found in 1844 a few yards away from where the head of Zeus came to light (see Balty and Cazes, op. cit., p. 123). According to Monique Clavel, the head "is very likely to have belonged to a cult statue of the god in a temple located on the forum" (Clavel, op. cit., p. 519). Like all Roman colonies ancient Béziers had a temple dedicated to the Capitoline Triad (Juno, Jupiter, and Minerva), which replicated the original structure in the forum romanum. The forum and its buildings would have been among the first structures established in 36/35 B.C. by the city's founders, all veterans of Julius Caesar's 7th Legion Victrix.

For a typologically related head of  Zeus found near Otricoli and now in the Museo Pio-Clementino in the Vatican, inv. no. 257 (G. Lippold, Die Skulpturen des Vaticanischen Museum, vol. 3, part 1, Berlin, p. 110, no. 539, pl. 36). For stylistically related early Imperial examples see a colossal bearded head from Cherchell (Chr. Landwehr, Die römischen Skulpturen von Caesarea Mauretaniae, vol. II, Mainz, 2000, no. 118), the head of Odysseus from the cave at Sperlonga (Ulisse. Il mito e la memoria, Rome, 1996, cover illus.), the heads of Zeus Ammon from the clipei of the Forum of augustus (I luoghi del consenso imperiale, Rome, 1995, nos. 11-13), and an acrolithic head of Zeus from Pompei (Il museo archeologico nazionale di Napoli, 2003, p. 108).