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Ancient Sculpture and Works of Art

Mesmerizing Sculpture from the Ancient World

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Sotheby's Ancient Sculpture & Works of Art sale on 4 December will offer a wide selection of fine Classical marble sculpture, Greek pottery, and Egyptian sculpture. Among these exceptional treasures, a rare funerary statue presents the exalted pose of poet, and the head and torso of the Zeus, the Greek ruler of the gods, commands attention. Click through to see more wondrous sculptures from the world's ancient civilisations.

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Ancient Sculpture & Works of Art
4 December 2018 | 3:30 PM GMT | London

Mesmerizing Sculpture from the Ancient World

  • A Marble Funerary Portrait Statue of a Roman Poet, Late Republican/Augustan, 2nd half of the 1st Century B.C.
    Estimate £1,500,000-2,000,000.
    This rare statue of a professional poet of the early years of the Empire shows the deceased as a semi-deified individual, bare-breasted and enthroned, holding his scroll as he would a scepter. Made in two parts, the statue is hollowed out to contain his ashes. His portrait features were once thought to be those of Virgil. Discovered before World War two, the statue went through the hands of prestigious art dealers both in Italy and in the United States before entering the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, in 1936. It has been on view at the Antikenmuseum in Basel for the past ten years.
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  • A Roman Marble Figure of the Muse Erato or Terpsichore, circa 2nd Century A.D.
    Estimate £150,000-250,000.
    This graceful and unusually well preserved statuette was probably part of a group of nine figures of muses surrounding Apollo on top of Mount Helikon. She was first attested on the art market in Munich in the 1920s before making her way to Vienna.
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  • A Fragmentary Greek Marble Grave Stele inscribed for Hedeia, Attic, circa 375-350 B.C.
    Estimate £120,000-180,000.
    This melancholy fragment of a grave marker from Athens shows the maiden Hedeia wearing three different types of garments and holding what was probably a painted object such as a flower in her raised right hand. Her name is inscribed above her. The object is first recorded with Ernest Brummer in New York in 1923.
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  • A Roman Marble Head of Aphrodite, 2nd half of the 2nd Century A.D.
    Estimate £100,000-150,000.
    With her mesmerising glance at once cold and sensuous, this beautifully scarred head of Aphrodite Anadyomene once stood on top of an over-lifesize statue showing the goddess emerging from the sea and rinsing the foam from her hair with her raised hands. She was sold twice before at Sotheby’s, in New York, first in 1982 and then in 1992, when the present owner acquired her.
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  • An Egyptian Limestone Relief Fragment, 19th Dynasty, early in the reign of Ramesses II, circa 1279-1250 B.C.
    Estimate £80,000-120,000.
    An Egyptian official is shown here making an offering of incense to a god or king. His smooth cranium and finely carved features appear in sunk relief, below the surface of the slab, beneath columns of inscriptions containing his titles, genealogy, and prayers for his welfare in the afterlife. The present relief was once in the collection of Sheldon Breitbart and sold in his sale at Sotheby’s, New York, in 1992.
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  • A Roman Marble Head of Zeus, late 1st/2nd Century A.D., on 18th Century Shoulders.
    Estimate £80,000-120,000.
    This head of a bearded god, probably of Zeus, broke off a statue in antiquity. In the 18th century, instead of shaving off the small part of the shoulder that was still preserved, a skilled Italian restorer lovingly integrated it into new shoulders, thus producing an object fit for display in one of the city’s palazzi. The entire bust was first recorded on the art market in Rome in the early 1930s, when it was still resting on an 18th- or 19th-century circular socle.
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  • An Attic Red-figured Column Krater, attributed to the Chairippos Painter, circa 490-470 B.C.
    Estimate £70,000-100,000.
    In this imposing krater by the Chairippos Painter, form and decoration are in complete harmony with function. The vase was used to mix wine and water during the symposion, the semi-sacred banqueting event dedicated to Dionysos. The god is depicted in front riding a donkey and brandishing a drinking-cup; on the back is painted one the followers of the god, a satyr carrying a wineskin.
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  • A Roman Marble Portrait Figure of a Boy, known as the "Young Nero", mid 1st Century A.D.
    Estimate £60,000-90,000.
    In the 18th Century this lively statue of a young boy wearing an unusually draped toga was identified as a portrait of the young Nero. The statue was first brought to the attention of the learned public in an engraving that formed part of one of the first antiquities dealer’s catalogues ever published, the Raccolta d’antiche statue by Bartolomeo Cavaceppi. In the caption to the engraving, the famous Italian dealer, restorer, and sculptor announced proudly that he had sold the statue to Sir John Dick, the British Consul at Livorno.
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  • A Roman Marble Togate Figure of a Woman, circa 2nd Century A.D.
    Estimate £50,000-80,000.
    This rare representation of a young Roman woman wearing a signet ring and a toga, a garment usually reserved for men, lost its original portrait head a long time ago and was given a new one in Italy in the 17th century. Her present head is that of a goddess rather than of an actual individual. The statue was considered to be lost since it was first recorded at auction in Rome in 1908.
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  • A Roman Marble Cinerary Urn inscribed for Lucius Calvinus Pubianus Sabinus, circa late 1st Century A.D.
    Estimate £40,000-60,000.
    This unique marble urn has passed through generations of the same French noble family since their ancestor acquired it in Rome in the late 18th Century, and for most of this time it has remained in their ancestral château. The urn resurfaced almost 240 years after it was first and last recorded in an engraving by Giambattista Piranesi. This is the first time a photograph of this object is ever published.

    Typical of Piranesi’s sophisticated reinvention of the classical past for Grand Tour consumption, the urn combines an elaborately decorated base produced by his own workshop, a rectangular cinerary chest with funerary inscription (probably added by his workshop), and a lid cut down and resized from that of a larger Roman funerary altar. The front of the lid shows one of the most touching tableaux of death in Ancient Rome: the bust of a child with his school supplies hanging beside him and his crouching dog placing its paw on his bare shoulder. Piranesi’s caption to his engraving brilliantly pulls together all the parts of the urn into a single cohesive antiquarian monument to loss and commemoration.
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