Type: Limited edition prints
Size: 48cm x 33cm
Tirage: 50 copies
A pencil drawing of an Imaginary portrait of the poet Homer (Greek : Όμηρος)
Pentelic marble, 2nd century AD after a 2nd century BC original. From the Palazzo Caetani in Rome. 53cm high. The image of old age portrayed here is one of great dignity, the restraint of the means employed serving only to intensify this effect. The emotionally powerful treatment of the features, marked by age, underlines the physical decline of an old man. The fixed gaze and the hollow depths of the sockets betray the blindness of the eyes. The poet's hair and the beard, meanwhile, are stirred by the breath of divine inspiration. Over his forehead is a bandeau or headband that distinguishes him from ordinary mortals. Now in the Louvre.
Homer was the legendary author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, two epic poems that are the central works of ancient Greek literature. The Iliad is set during the Trojan War, the ten-year siege of the city of Troy by a coalition of Greek kingdoms. It focuses on a quarrel between King Agamemnon and the warrior Achilles lasting a few weeks during the last year of the war. The Odyssey focuses on the ten-year journey home of Odysseus, king of Ithaca, after the fall of Troy. Many accounts of Homer's life circulated in classical antiquity, the most widespread being that he was a blind bard from Ionia, a region of central coastal Anatolia in present-day Turkey. Modern scholars consider these accounts legendary.
