Herm of Venus ("Sappho" type)

late 1st century B.C.

Medium

Italian marble

Dimensions

48.5 × 28.5 cm

Status

In Museum Collection

Collect24 Art ID

C24-248303

The bust of an adult woman faces frontally atop a marble herm shaft. Her idealized face is markedly oblong, with somewhat widely set eyes and a prominent nasal bridge. An engraved headband sits over her tall forehead and compresses her hair, so that wavy locks emerge from underneath as voluminous projections. Faint traces at the joining surface of the separately-carved back of the head indicate that the back-swept hair was collected above the neck in a hair-bag, present in other examples of this type. A second headband, tied at the top of the head, supports this hair-bag from below. The herm belongs to a Roman sculptural type, known in almost two dozen examples and most commonly referred to as the “Sappho type” due to an earlier (unsupported) identification of the head with the famous poet from Lesbos. Research suggests that the woman is more likely to be the goddess Venus (or Aphrodite) and might even reference a famous statue of the goddess by the Classical Greek sculptor Pheidias. This is the only Venus type that was regularly depicted in herm format. The Getty herm is the only example of the type that fully preserves its ancient herm bust and the upper part of its shaft.