Contemporary Indian Sculpture: The Madras Metaphor

Description

This book begins with a specific problem: the date, style, and iconography of a marble portrait head identified as Pyrrhos, King of Epeiros. Largely by collating with portraits on coins, the head is defined stylistically – dated c.305/304 – c.280 B.C., when the Successors ruled as kings – and confirmed as Pyrrhos. Further study of both coins and sculptures yields a fuller, more complex account of the portraiture of that period, in historic context as well as style, and also of the periods directly before c.305/304 B.C. and after c.280 B.C. In the course of making comparisons, later Hellenistic portraits are discussed as well.