FRANCE | PAIR OF BUSTS OF GALEN AND HIPPOCRATES

Sotheby’s, Paris, 5 May 2015, lot 292

This elegant pair of busts of the great medical theorists of antiquity, Galen and Hippocrates, would doubtless have once been placed in a physician’s office or in a scholar’s library. Galen was the foremost physician to have lived during the Roman Empire. His writings are so extensive that they comprise one-eighth of all surviving Greek literature. This perhaps underscores the practical significance given to his teachings by later generations of scribes. Galen was responsible for many of the practices which underpin medical knowledge even today, including how to check a patient’s pulse. Hippocrates of Kos lived in the age of Pericles and is often called the ‘Father of Medicine’. He is, of course, best known for being credited as the creator of the ‘Hippocratic Oath’. The busts are inscribed ‘Reverand sculpsit Orelianinsis 1819’ which is perhaps a latinised way of saying ‘from Orléans’. Interestingly a sculptor called Révérend was active in Orléans in 1800, see D. Lottin, Recherches historiques sur la ville d’Orléans, Orléans, 1800, p. 319. This sculptor may have been responsible for the present busts. The busts, with their blank eyes and herm truncations, are fundamentally indebted to ancient Greek portraiture.