having ever, before Visconti, been imagined to represent Lycurgus ;
and that in no case could it he taken for anything else than a fancy-
portrait, not more to he trusted than the statue of Coltjmbus,
commonly called the “ ninepin-player,” before your Capitol, or the
relief portrait of Daniel Boone in the Rotunda at Washington.
TT- Tour portrait of A l ex a n d e r t h e G reat; likewise from. Pou-
que ville,13 is by far more authentic than the
Flg' pretended likeness of Lycurgus. The original
marble bust, of which you give a copy, is
now placed in the Louvre at Paris, as' a memorial
of Napoleon I. ; who received it as a
present from the Spanish Ambassador, the
Chevalier d’Azara. The accomplished Chevalier
caused a panegyrical dedicatory inscription
to he sculptured on the side of this
bust, before presenting it to the modern
Alexander. The Bourbons, unconsciously
following the traditions of the Emperor Cara-
calla, and of several Egyptian Pharaohs, ordered
the mention of their obnoxious predecessor
to he obliterated on this monument ; but traces of the destroyed
inscription sufficieiitly record the resentment and bad taste of those
who had “ rien oublié ni rien appris.” The bust was originally found
near Tivoli, the ancient Tibur, in the year 1779, hearing the inscription
AAEIANAPD 2
c&iAinnnY
MAKEA
The form of the letters shows, according to Visconti,14 that this
excellent piece of sculpture could not have been contemporaneous
with the conqueror of Persia ; and that it probably belongs to the
last epoch of the Roman Republic, or to the beginning of the Empire.
Still, as the features of the Macedonian king were in his life-time
immortalized by such eminent artists as Apelles, Pyrgoteles and
Lysippus ; and since his portraits served as seals and emblems of coins
soon after his' death, it may seem tolerably certain, that the marble
bust in question gives us really the likeness of the conqueror. Yet
there remains one difficulty about it. The bust having been found
in a mutilated state, the broken nose was restored, without consulting
the coins of Lysimachus, one of the generals and successors of
Alexander, who had the portrait of his late master put on them.
18 Grèce, pi. 85 :—Types, p. 104, fig. 6. 14 Icon, grecque, II. page 47.
Thus the restoration altered the features a little, a somewhat longer
nose being attached to the bust, than the earlier effigies on coins
statues, and mosaics warrant. With the slight exception, therefore,
that the tip of the nose is too long and too pointed, the portrait in
the “Types” ought to satisfy sound criticism. Still, Staatsrath
Koehler, the renowned hut presumptuous Russian archæologist,
hypercrftically rejects the Azara-hust, as of no use to iconography;15
but as he omits the reasons for his harsh sentence, he must allow us
to be so malicious, and to infer, from the date of his essay,16 written
during the Russo-Persian war, that he was disappointed at not being
able to discover a likeness between the bust of the great Macedonian
and the would-be inheritor of his schemes, the late Czar Nicholas :
at the same time that Erench archaeologists maintain that A l exander,
A ugustus, and R amesses, hear a striking likeness to Napoleon I.
But if the Russian archæologist went too far on the side of hypercriticism,
the author of “ Inscriptions of the British Museum,” and
the arranger of the Egyptian Court in the Sydenham Crystal Palace,
err considerably more on the other side ; having been taken in by
one of the most barefaced archaeological impostures of modem
times. In 1850, a 4to volume (360 pages text and LXT plates) was
published at Didot s by Mons. J . Barrois, under the suspicious title
of “Dactylologie et Langage Primitif;” in which pi. LIX gives
“ the portrait of Alexander taken during his life {représenté de son
vivant) from a bas-relief painted in four colours by Apelles, (!), and
found in 1844 under the sand of a subterraneous tomb at Cereasoré
on the Nile.” Since this wonderful book was printed for private
circulation, and did not get into the book-market, criticism remained
silent; but the portrait having been introduced into the Crystal
Palace, we must protest against the clumsy forgery which attributes
an Egyptian bas-relief to Apelles the Greek painter. Besides, though
its style is Pharaonic, the eye is foreshortened in the Greek way;
the Egyptian cartouche is false; whilst the Greek inscription,
wrongly spelt,17 is neither Egyptian nor Greek, and the form of its
letters is partly archaic, partly Latin. 1 was shocked at the very
first sight of such a east exhibited among copies of the best remains
°f Egypt; and afterwards learned from Mr. Gliddon, that it is generally
known in Paris, how the relief (with its companion, which
purports to represent H e phæ st io n ), had been manufactured ex-
" Abhandlung über die geschnittenen Steine, &o. St. Petersburg, 1851, p. 10,—referring
to bis essay in B ö t t iq e e ’s Archäologie und Kunst. Band 1, page 13.
The inscription runs as follows :
ALEKMNDP*
YIO* AMOYN*