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| Farnese Diadumenos 1st century AD Roman marble copy of an earlier Greek bronze British Museum |
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| Farnese Diadumenos 1st century AD Roman marble copy of an earlier Greek bronze British Museum |
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| Farnese Diadumenos 1st century AD Roman marble copy of an earlier Greek bronze British Museum |
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| Hermes ca. 340-320 BC Greek marble relief on a column drum from temple at Ephesus British Museum |
"As now the ancients had ascended step by step from human to divine beauty, this scale of beauty was preserved. They brought their heroes, that is, the men to whom antiquity attributed the highest worthiness of nature, to the threshold of divinity without crossing it or blurring the very fine distinction."
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| Aphrodite ca. 350-150 BC Hellenistic marble sculpture British Museum |
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| Apollo ca. AD 120-140 Roman marble copy of an earlier Greek bronze British Museum |
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| Colossal female head ca. 350-325 BC Greek marble sculpture British Museum |
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| Winged head ca. AD 120-150 Roman marble sculpture British Museum |
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| Figure from the east pediment of the Parthenon 438-432 BC Greek marble sculpture British Museum |
"Because the proportions and forms of beauty had been so intensely studied by artists in antiquity, and because the contours of the figures had been so fully defined that they could be shifted neither outward nor inward without error, the concept of beauty could not be driven any higher."
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| Male head carved with roughened band for attachment of helmet ca. 460-440 BC Greek marble sculpture British Museum |
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| Head of a Ptolomaic ruler 1st century BC Hellenistic marble sculpture British Museum |
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| Apollo 2nd century AD Roman marble copy of an earlier Hellenistic original British Museum |
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| Athena (the 'Treu Head') ca. AD 140-150 Roman marble copy of an earlier Greek sculpture British Museum |
"On idealized heads, the eyes always lie more deeply than generally is the case in nature, and the orbit thus appears more raised. Deep-seated eyes are certainly not a characteristic of beauty and do not make for a very open air. But here art could not follow nature at all times, and instead it adhered to the concepts of grandeur in the high style. For on large figures, which are more distant from the viewer than smaller ones, the eyes and eyebrows would have been little apparent from a distance – since the eyeball is not marked, as in painting, but completely smooth for the most part – if these were only as prominent as in nature, and if the orbit had not been raised likewise as a result. ... Art, which in this respect raised itself above nature with good reason, made from this appearance an almost universal rule, even for small works: on heads on coins from the best periods, the eyes are likewise deeply set and the orbit more prominent than in later times."
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| Male head (the 'Aberdeen Head') ca. 325-280 BC Greek marble sculpture British Museum |
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| Dionysos ca. 300-100 BC Hellenistic marble sculpture British Museum |
– quotations from History of the Art of Antiquity (1764) by Johann Joachim Winckelmann, translated into English by Harry Francis Mallgrave and published in 2006 by Getty Research Institute.