Sokrates in Aquileia?

Ludovico Rebaudo,

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Abstract

The male head no. 785 in the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Aquileia, which entered the museum as a gift of baron Guglielmo Ritter von Zahony in 1882, is generally tought to be a unfinished portrait of Socrates and generally classified among the three types of the socratic portrait. This study the history of the head and identifies its very findspot, immediately south of the Museum’s building (parc. 730), based on the evidence of administrative documents and related maps of the Hapsburg land register, now in the Archivio di Stato di Gorizia. The Author points then his attention on the man’s “Konzentrationsmimik”, rarely attested in socratic portraiture and surely not in the supposed archetypes of the A and B types, also the head in the Platonic Academy and the later Lysippo’s statue in the Pompeion made by commission of the Athenian boulé. He proposes finally a new identification of the philosopher with Anaximander by comparing him with a marble inscribed relief-head in the deposit of the Museo Nazionale Romano (inv. 506).