The head of an Amazon made of Pentelic marble – found at the beginning of the 1920s in the port of Baia among the remains of sunken structures belonging to the Imperial palace – was a Julio-Claudian copy of a Greek original that was very famous in ancient times: the Amazon of a type known as Sosikles.
It has been proposed to attribute the head to the lower part of the statue found in the 1920s in the same area and interpreted as an Artemis.
As it is known, faithful copies of famous originals were made in the workshop of Baiae: among these, three Amazons by Phidias (so-called Mattei type), Polykleitos (so-called Sciarra type) and Kresilas (so-called Sosikles type), originally located in the majestic Artemision of Ephesus, in Asia Minor.
The fragment shows no signs of biological colonisation.
La Rocca, E. 1979, ‘Policleto e la sua scuola’, Storia e civiltà dei Greci, II, 4, p. 535.
Maniscalco, F. 1995, ‘Un ninfeo severiano nelle acque del porto di Baia’, Ostraka, 4(2), p. 267.
Maniscalco, F. 1997, Ninfei ed edifici marittimi severiani del Palatium imperiale di Baia. Napoli: Massa Editore, p. 52.
Napoli, M. 1953 ‘Di una villa marittima di Baia’, Bollettino di Storia dell’Arte. Istituto Universitario di Magistero, Salerno, III(1), pp. 93-94.
Zevi F. (cur.) 2009, Museo archeologico dei Campi Flegrei. Castello di Baia. Napoli: Electa Napoli, vol. 3, p. 125.