Ancient object
The Chiaramonti Demosthenes
Marble portrait statue
Vatican Museums, Vatican City
Object provenance
Record checked- Object
- Marble portrait statue
- Material
- Marble
- Made
- Evidence level: ProbableRoman imperial period
- Copy of
- A bronze statue by Polyeuktos erected in the Athenian agora in 280 BCE, some forty years after Demosthenes' death. More than fifty Roman portraits of Demosthenes derive from it.
- Found
- Evidence level: UnknownNot recorded in this catalogue
- Excavated
- Not recorded
- Inventory
- Not recorded in this catalogue
- Identification
- Evidence level: ProbableDemosthenes
The type is secure because the copies are numerous and consistent and because the original was a public monument in a known location. What no copy establishes is likeness: the original was made four decades after the subject died.
Not recorded here
- The findspot before the Villa Aldobrandini collection
- Inventory number
Read across
How to read the evidence labels
- Evidence level: Documented
- Supported by a named primary text or by excavated material evidence.
- Evidence level: Probable
- Supported by strong inference that most specialists accept.
- Evidence level: Disputed
- Substantial specialist disagreement exists; competing readings are stated.
- Evidence level: Literary
- Belongs to poetic or mythological construction rather than to history.
- Evidence level: Mythological
- Belongs to shared religious or mythic tradition rather than to any single text.
- Evidence level: Unknown
- The available evidence is insufficient to decide.
These labels describe the status of the evidence, not our confidence in a conclusion. A claim marked Literary is not a claim we doubt; it is a claim about what kind of thing a poem is.