Head of Achilles

This head of a helmeted warrior with the face tilted back and the eyes gazing upwards is a modern work. The figure wears an Attic helmet with a visor ending in volutes above the ears. The eyes are deep set and the mouth is half open. The nostrils were created by a modern power drill.

When this head, seemingly broken from a larger sculpture, appeared on the market in the late 1970s, scholars thought it was an original work by Skopas, the great Greek sculptor of the 300s B.C. Although he was one of the most famous sculptors in antiquity, the only sculpture securely attributed to him was the fragmentary sculptural decoration of the Temple of Athena Alea at Tegea in southern Greece, now in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens. The Getty Museum’s head closely resembles a head from the temple, and scholars believed this newly discovered head probably also belonged to the same temple and represented the hero Achilles. Yet, from the moment of its appearance, there were doubts about the head's authenticity. While the sculpture fragments from the temple are worn and battered, the Getty Museum's head is remarkably well preserved. Ancient sculptors often carved replicas of other sculptures, but when the two heads were measured using a cast of the Tegea head, the Getty’s head and the head in Athens were shown to have exactly the same dimensions, a degree of exactitude not expected from an ancient sculptor. Moreover, the forger was fooled by modern restorations on the Tegea head. Although the Getty’s head precisely replicates the helmet worn by the Tegea head, part of the helmet on the Tegea head is itself a modern restoration. In other words, the sculptor of the head in the Getty Museum’s collection unwittingly copied a modern element that had been added to the ancient and authentic head in Athens.