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| Hellenistic sculpture, believed to be after Lysippus Portrait Head of Alexander ca. 320 BC marble statue fragment Getty Museum, Los Angeles |
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| Hellenistic sculpture, believed to be after Lysippus Alexander the Great 2nd century BC marble statuette Getty Museum, Los Angeles |
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| Roman sculpture, believed to be after Lysippus Bust traditionally known as The Dying Alexander 2nd-1st century BC marble Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence |
"We read that after him, Menaechmus and the great sculptor Lysippus wrote about art. Among his other works, the latter carved a statue, much larger than life-size, of Alexander the Macedonian, wounded. Only fragments of it survive: parts of the bust, arm, and head. In this statue Lysippus expressed, with a singular mastery, the large concavity of the eyes, the stereometric form of the nose, and perfect harmony and consonance among all the other parts of the body. These stereometric forms were subsequently imitated by modern artists – Polidoro, Michelangelo, and Raphael – in order to embellish our modern style so as to rival the ancient one. They selected this statue with the greatest judgment, because, apart from the excellence of all other other parts of Alexander, the head, in particular, is considered among connoisseurs as the most exceptional and artful found in the world today. In his treatise, Lysippus demonstrated how to observe the stereometric forms of the members of bodies, how to make the arms and hands long, as well as the feet and head small; others had previously made the head large, as it is in real life. This diminution was considered by the greatest artists as the most beautiful invention ever discovered."
– from chapter four of Giovan Paolo Lomazzo's Idea of the Temple of Painting (1590), edited and translated by Jean Julia Chai (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013)
No original sculpture by Lysippus (390-300 BC) is now believed to have survived from antiquity. His extraordinary reputation is based on ancient literary sources and on the multitude of ancient Greek and Roman copies made (or formerly believed to have been made) after his works. There is no doubt that Lysippus was in fact the official court sculptor to Alexander the Great and responsible for his portrait-images. Yet the majority of such supposed ancient portraits, celebrated in the Renaissance by Lomazzo and his contemporaries, are no longer regarded as likenesses of Alexander and no longer believed to replicate originals by Lysippus. The so-called Azara Herm in the Louvre (below) was discovered at Tivoli in 1779, two centuries after Lomazzo's lifetime. The work bears an authentic ancient inscription identifying it as a portrait of Alexander, and is now taken to be a genuine copy of an original by Lysippus and the most accurate surviving likeness of Alexander. However, it conforms relatively little to anything Lomazzo was describing in his laudatory commentary on the excellence and influence of Lysippus. Nor has it ever gained favor in the still-ongoing, romanticized iconography of Alexander the Great.
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| Roman sculptor after Lysippus Azara Herm (Portrait of Alexander the Great) 3rd-1st century BC marble Musée du Louvre, Paris |
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| Roman sculptor after Lysippus Azara Herm (Portrait of Alexander the Great) 3rd-1st century BC marble Musée du Louvre, Paris |