ITALIAN, 19TH CENTURY, AFTER THE ANTIQUE | BUST OF ARES

This magnificent bust of Achilles broadly follows an antique marble in the Hermitage. Depicting a semi-bearded young warrior wearing a crested helmet decorated with griffins, dogs and surmounted by a sphinx, the present bust is a copy of the so-called Borghese Ares type, named after the monumental statue of the God of War from the Borghese collection, now in the Musée du Louvre (inv. no. MA 866). The Borghese Ares is generally considered to be a Roman Imperial copy of a 5th-century BC original by the Greek sculptor Alcamenes, though an alternative hypothesis that the model could instead have been conceived in the Augustan period has been proposed. Numerous ancient Roman replicas of the Ares have survived, most as fragments of the figure’s head. Perhaps the most famous of these is that now in the Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (inv. no. 108), which was found near Rome in 1772, restored as a bust, and subsequently acquired by Ivan Ivanovich Shuvalov, who transferred it to St Petersburg in 1777.