Uploaded July 2025 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago
A quick video about the two marble heads held by the Getty Villa Museum, depicting Alexander and Hephaistion from a fragmentary group. While the authenticity of the heads has been questioned (legitimately), if real, they date to the very early Hellenistic period not long after Alexander's death (c. 320-300 BCE). Both are highly idealized (e.g., ancient Photoshop), and the head often called Hephaistion cannot be confidently identified as him (e.g. it was not labeled). It's VERY generic, in line with the aesthetic canons of male beauty for the era. We have only one surviving labeled statue of Hephaistion (a dedicatory plaque housed in the Thessaloniki Archaeological Museum), but it may not reflect what he actually *looked* like either, due to the way such dedicatory plaques were typically created for sale in the ancient world.
In order to ID otherwise unlabeled statues, we must have enough of them that *are* labeled in order to create a canon for that individual--as we have for Alexander (or Caesar, or Augustus, or Hadrian, etc.). For figures with few/no surviving labeled sculptures, it's all educated guesses. Ergo, in the Getty, the Hephaistion head is labeled "of a youth"--which is as it should be. ;-)
Individuals mentioned: art historians Olga Palagia and Andrew Stewart.
Stewart's massive book on Alexander's image:
Faces of Power: Alexander's Image and Hellenistic Politics
https://www.ucpress.edu/books/faces-of-power/hardcover
The article mentioned on the youth of Macedonian kings in artwork:
A. I. Molina Marín. 2020: “Forever Young. The strange youth of the Macedonian Kings”, Karanos 3: 39-57
A quick video about the two marble heads held by the Getty Villa Museum, depicting Alexander and Hephaistion from a fragmentary group. While the authenticity of the heads has been questioned (legitimately), if real, they date to the very early Hellenistic period not long after Alexander's death (c. 320-300 BCE). Both are highly idealized (e.g., ancient Photoshop), and the head often called Hephaistion cannot be confidently identified as him (e.g. it was not labeled). It's VERY generic, in line with the aesthetic canons of male beauty for the era. We have only one surviving labeled statue of Hephaistion (a dedicatory plaque housed in the Thessaloniki Archaeological Museum), but it may not reflect what he actually *looked* like either, due to the way such dedicatory plaques were typically created for sale in the ancient world.
In order to ID otherwise unlabeled statues, we must have enough of them that *are* labeled in order to create a canon for that individual--as we have for Alexander (or Caesar, or Augustus, or Hadrian, etc.). For figures with few/no surviving labeled sculptures, it's all educated guesses. Ergo, in the Getty, the Hephaistion head is labeled "of a youth"--which is as it should be. ;-)
Individuals mentioned: art historians Olga Palagia and Andrew Stewart.
Stewart's massive book on Alexander's image:
Faces of Power: Alexander's Image and Hellenistic Politics
https://www.ucpress.edu/books/faces-of-power/hardcover
The article mentioned on the youth of Macedonian kings in artwork:
A. I. Molina Marín. 2020: “Forever Young. The strange youth of the Macedonian Kings”, Karanos 3: 39-57
