Upper Body of a Bearded Horseman with a Mould-Made Face, Kourion Type

Late Cypro-Classical to Early Hellenistic, c. 400–200 BCE · Terracotta · Handmade body with mould-made face

The upper body of a bearded man, broken away at the hips. The face, pressed from a mould, is crisp and alert: heavy arched brows, large lidded eyes, a straight nose, a small mouth under a moustache, and a full beard rendered as a projecting block of short incised strands. Thick locks or lappets hang at either side of the face. He wears a low domed cap with a broad flattened brim, like a beret. The torso is a flat, broad slab with rounded shoulders; the arms, rolled by hand, hang at the sides; the right survives to the lower break, and the left is broken at the forearm. A shallow curved ridge crosses the lower torso just above the break. The pale buff surface is lightly pitted and shows no surviving paint. The fragment is mounted on a modern stand.

Commentary

Although the figure now reads as a standing bust, it is the rider from a horse-and-rider group. The arms hanging at the sides, the flat hand-built torso and the break at the hips, where the body sat astride the horse, match a well-defined late series of Cypriot riders. Metropolitan 74.51.1635 (Cesnola Cat. 285, H. 10 cm, said to come from the Sanctuary of Apollo Hylates at Kourion) is a handmade, solid horseman with a mould-made face, nude, bearded and preserved to the hips, both upper arms hanging at the sides, with an incised, sharply projecting beard and a domed cap whose wide flattened brim falls into lappets on the shoulders [1]. That description fits this piece closely, and the Metropolitan dates it to the Early Hellenistic period, late fourth to third century BCE [1]. Its companion, 74.51.1636 (Cat. 284, H. 9.5 cm), is the same format in a mitra headdress and is dated Cypro-Classical II, c. 400–310 BCE; 74.51.1784 (Cat. 286), a complete horse and rider of the early third century, shows how the group looked whole [1].

The technique supports the date. At Kourion the Youngs traced the moulded rider face from its introduction in the last quarter of the sixth century, around 510 BCE, to its dominance by about 480 BCE, after which a handmade body with a mould-pressed face remained the standard rider for some four centuries [2]. A moulded face therefore gives a date after c. 510 BCE, and the brimmed cap and the modelling of the beard place this rider in the later part of the sequence. The Metropolitan compares the face of Cat. 285 with the Youngs' Kourion mould 20 [1][2]; this face is of the same general kind, although it has not been matched to a specific mould.

The type descends from the Cypro-Archaic horse-and-rider votives classified by Karageorghis [3], which the Cesnola catalogue calls perhaps the most popular type of figurine in the Archaic period [4]. The later riders were dedicated above all at Kourion, where the sanctuary of Apollo Hylates yielded them in great numbers [2]. A Kourion workshop is therefore the most likely origin for this piece, though the Metropolitan describes the Kourion fabric as brick-red and somewhat coarse [4], and the pale fabric here leaves that attribution provisional. The object has no recorded find-spot.