2016.02.29, rewritten 2024.05.27 | By Keith DeStone
This is to memorialize a public event held at the National Gallery of Art on February 25, 2016 titled “A poet or a god: The iconography of certain bearded male bronzes.” It was the second of two panel discussions planned by the Gallery and Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies to highlight the exhibition, Power and Pathos: Bronze Sculpture of the Hellenistic World (showing at the National Gallery in Washington, extending from December 13, 2015, to March 20, 2016).
The panel discussion focused on a bronze head, shown here in the featured image. Previous researchers had identified the subject as Antigonos Doson in the guise of Poseidon. One of the panelists, Gloria Ferrari Pinney, argued against this view, proposing that the bronze represents Homer. In agreement was another panelist, Gregory Nagy who analyzed relevant ancient myths about the life of Homer.
For information about the first of the two panel discussions, see 2016.02.22.