Bust of a young woman after the antique

This dark-patinated bronze head of a young woman, mounted on a later cuboid black metal socle, turns gently to the left in the manner of a Neoclassical ideal portrait. Her hair is piled high above the brow in a dense, arranged mass, bound across the crown with a plain diadem or fillet and gathered, low at the nape, into a compact knotted chignon — the arrangement that nineteenth-century sculptors, echoing an ancient vocabulary, called the krobylos. Beneath it, the face is rendered with a deliberate, idealising symmetry: a long straight nose continuing the brow's line without a break, a small closed mouth with narrow, evenly set lips, and wide, heavy-lidded eyes gazing levelly ahead — a physiognomy drawn not from a sitter but from the standard repertoire of Greco-Roman beauty that nineteenth-century academic sculpture inherited wholesale.