Eutropios

This highly expressive bust of an elderly man probably functioned as an honorary monument originally set up in a columned hall near the main theatre of Ephesus. The sitter is believed to be Eutropios, a citizen of Ephesus identified and honoured in a Greek inscription on a console found nearby as the man who paid for the paving the city’s streets. The bust’s formal abstraction and the sublimation of the sitter’s individual features are typical of artworks produced in Late Antiquity. It is an example of the typical contemporary portrait type of a high-ranking civil servant in a Roman provincial metropolis. The portrait is on show in the Kunsthistorisches Museum’s Collection of Greek and Roman Antiquities (Gallery XVIII).