Head

Head is a subject in art. The gallery holds 56 works in this subject in art, including works by Paolo Veronese, Gustave Courbet and Caravaggio.

In biology the head is the part of an organism that gathers the senses—sight, hearing, smell, and taste—and houses the brain; many bilaterally symmetric animals possess one, though some very simple forms do not. In art, however, the head carries a weight far beyond anatomy. Because it is the seat of identity, thought, and the gaze, the isolated head has functioned across cultures as a stand-in for the whole person, a vessel of the soul, and an object of both veneration and dread. Among the oldest sculpted heads are the schematic marble faces of the Cycladic islands and the colossal basalt heads of the Olmec of Mexico's Gulf Coast (c. 1200–400 BCE), each carved from a single boulder and bearing the individualized features of mature rulers.

The portrait bust—a head and upper shoulders rendered in stone, bronze, or wax—was a Hellenistic Greek invention, famously anticipated by the Egyptian Bust of Nefertiti (c. 1345 BCE). The Romans made it central to civic and family life, descending from the wax ancestral masks kept in patrician atria, and prized a veristic likeness that recorded age and character. After a medieval eclipse the form was revived in the Renaissance by sculptors such as Francesco Laurana and brought to dramatic life in the Baroque by Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680), whose swaggering portraits redefined European sculpture.

Against this commemorative tradition runs a darker current: the severed or disembodied head. Biblical and mythological narratives—Judith and Holofernes, David and Goliath, Perseus and Medusa, and above all the beheading of John the Baptist—supplied painters with charged subjects, exemplified by Caravaggio's writhing Medusa (c. 1597). Symbolist artists of the late nineteenth century returned obsessively to the living, singing head as an emblem of martyrdom and of the destructive eroticism of the femme fatale.

In the twentieth century Constantin Brâncuși distilled the head to its essence: his Sleeping Muse (1910) and Newborn reduce the face to a polished ovoid, a subject he pursued for nearly two decades and which helped launch modern abstraction. The head also anchors performance traditions, as in the carved Japanese Noh mask—the serene old man and the horned, jealous Hannya demon—where a single face encodes age, gender, and shifting emotion, two of which the present collection holds in Ogawa Haritsu's mask studies.