Coptic Head of Zeus
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A carved limestone head of a bearded man, with hair falling around his face in thick locks. His strong features are carved deeply: a slightly downturned mouth, broad nose, and deep-set eyes below a prominent brow. The hair is detailed roughly on the reverse of the head, flowing down to the wide neck at the base of the piece. The piece is pierced vertically from the base of the neck through to the raised projection in the centre of the crown of the head, perhaps for attachment to a larger piece.
The Coptic period refers to the time in Late Roman and Byzantine Egypt (3rd-7th centuries B.C.) when Egyptian religious culture shifted from ancient Egyptian polytheism to Coptic Christianity. Coptic art drew from both Egyptian and Hellenistic sources, sometimes adapting the subjects and symbols from Greek and Egyptian mythology to align with their Christian beliefs. The melded styles reflect the multicultural society of Egypt at this time, and a similar fusion appears in Coptic music that incorporated older Egyptian melodies into Christian songs. This head features many aspects of previous Greco-Roman sculptures of Zeus, the god of thunder, with his thick beard and frowning brow.
Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, Maryland, in 1973 and 1977 (Loan nos. 14.73 and 25.77), with old label on stand.
With Nasli M. Heeramaneck (1902-1971), New York, by at least 1964.
Thence by descent to Alice Heeramaneck (1910-1993), New York.
ALR: S00248667, with IADAA Certificate, this item has been checked against the Interpol database.
Nasli M. Heeramaneck (1902-1971) was a dealer and collector of Iranian, Central Asian, and European antiquities. The son of an art dealer in Bombay, Heeramaneck entered his father’s business and operated galleries in London and Paris. Heeramaneck lived in Paris from at least 1927 into the 1930s. He developed a large collection of Luristan bronzes by the early 1930s, and had already sold one of these to the British Museum by 1924. He moved to New York and continued to develop his collection over the next fifty years or so. His wife, Alice Heeramaneck (1910-1993), described that his process was to ‘buy five, sell four and keep the best for himself’. In this way, his keen eye and expertise ensured that he developed a high-quality list of clients, primarily museums and major collectors.
Heeramaneck kept his personal collection close: ‘I collected the works of art and enjoyed them. They were not for sale. I kept them together, knowing that some day they’d be in a museum’. Now, many of his works are in museum collections. In 1966, Heeramaneck donated a major collection of Pre-Columbian art to New Delhi’s National Museum, including around 200 pieces of pottery, stoneware, textiles and gold from Mayan and South American cultures. Heeramaneck said he wanted to give back to India, as it was the source for many of the other works in his collection. In 1969, the Los Angeles County Museum acquired his collection of Indian, Nepalese, and Tibetan artworks, encompassing works from antiquity to the eighteenth century. This was valued at the time to be worth about $2.5 million and was used to establish a study centre for Asian art at the museum. After Heeramaneck’s death, the museum acquired further pieces from his collection, alongside some of Alice Heeramaneck’s own collection, in 1976. Alice served as an honorary trustee of the museum.
