Late 18th Bronze Bust depicting Pseudo-Seneca

Brown-patina bronze bust depicting Pseudo-Seneca, Italy, early 19th century.

Pseudo-Seneca is a Roman bronze bust from the late 1st century BC, discovered in 1754 in the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum and now housed in the National Archaeological Museum of Naples.
It is the finest example ever discovered of approximately two dozen busts depicting the same subject. It was initially believed to represent Lucius Annaeus Seneca, the famous Roman philosopher of the 1st century AD. Since the 19th century, the traditional theory of a “life portrait” of Seneca has been dismissed, and many other hypotheses have been proposed regarding the identity of the sitter portrayed in the imaginary portrait: from the Archaic period (Hesiod or Aesop; the iambographers Archilochus or Hipponax), from the Classical period (the playwrights Epicharmus, Aristophanes, and Philemon; the tragedian Euripides), from the Hellenistic period (the philosophers Carneades and Eratosthenes; the poets Callimachus, Apollonius of Rhodes, and Philitas of Cos), or even the Latin poet Lucretius.

The bust features an expressive face, with a thick beard and unkempt hair, giving it a melancholic and thoughtful appearance. Its discovery made such a splash in the art world that, in the early 19th century, Neapolitan workshops were granted permission to take a cast of the head to make bronze copies. The original busts of Seneca date back to this period and are of excellent quality.
The bust rests on its original yellow Siena marble base.

Measurements
H cm 46
W cm 22