Silanion

Silanion was the best-known of the Greek portrait-sculptors working during the fourth century BC. Pliny gives his floruit as the 113th Olympiad, that is, around 328–325 BCE, and records he had no famous teacher. His idealized portrait head of Plato was commissioned by Mithridates of Persia for the Academy of Athens, c. 370 BC. Later copies of it and of an idealized portrait head of Sappho survive. Both are of simple ideal type, the Sappho not strictly a portrait, since Sappho lived before the age of portraiture. The best copy of Plato is in the Glyptothek of Munich (illustration).