Kresilas

Herm of Pericles bearing the inscription “Pericles, son of Xanthippus, Athenian”, Roman copy of the original by Kresilas, Vatican Museums (no. 269)

Kresilas was a Greek sculptor from Kydonia. He lived in the 5th century BC. He worked in Athens at the time of the Peloponnesian war, as a follower of the idealistic portraiture of Myron.

Pericles statue

Berlin example

In Athens he created, for example a bronze statue of Pericles (440-430 B.C.) with the Corinthian helmet upon the head as sign of his position as strategos. ^[1] its base was found in the Athenian Acropolis; it was doubtless the bronze that Pausanius saw there (I.25.1, I.28.2). It seems the series of Pericles portrait busts derive from it, of which there are examples at the Vatican Museums, British Museum (found at Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli, and owned by Charles Townley [1]) and Altes Museum.

Kresilas also created the wounded men and a dying Amazon for Ephesus in concurrence (in a competition with Pheidias and Polyclitus), possibly the model for many copies, one of which is the wounded Amazon of Kresilas (volnerata; Pliny, Nat. Hist. xxxiv. 75) is in the Vatican Museums.

He has also been identified as the originator of the Velletri type of Athena statue.

Kresilas, though actually a man, was accidentally included in Judy Chicago's work The Dinner Party.^[2]

^ "Cresilas did...the Olympian Pericles, a figure worthy of its title; indeed it is a marvellous thing about the art of sculpture that it has added celebrity to men already celebrated." (Pliny, Natural History, XXXIV.74)
^ Brooklyn Museum