Ancient sculpture communicates cultural, ideological, and emotional meanings, yet emotional expression has often been interpreted primarily through descriptive evaluation. This study proposes a three-layered model combining FACS based morphological observation with iconographic and psycho-iconographic interpretation to examine representations of fear in ancient sculpture. Since FACS was developed for facial behaviour in motion, the sculptures are treated not as behavioural records but as static, artistically stylised facial forms.
Visible features of the brow, eyes, mouth, and jaw are first described and then compared with FACS Action Unit appearances. Focusing on Classical and Hellenistic works and their Roman copies and adaptations, the analysis shows that facial forms associated with fear frequently overlap with pain, surprise, physical tension, shock, and defensive reactions, while narrative contexts of threat, defeat, and impending death strengthen their interpretation as fear-related. The proposed model does not aim to identify the inner emotions of the figures or to establish a universal emotional code, but rather to make the visual, iconographic, and psycho-iconographic stages of emotional interpretation clearer and more comparable.
We gratefully acknowledges the British Museum, the Gallerie degli Uffizi, Gabinetto Fotografico, and the Antikensammlung, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, for providing images and/or granting permission for their scholarly publication. The author also acknowledges the use of appropriately licensed images made available through Wikimedia Commons. Department of Archeology, Yozgat Bozok University, Yozgat, Turkey The authors declare no competing interests.
This article does not involve human participants, human data, interviews, surveys, ethnographic observation, or experimental research. Therefore, ethical approval and informed consent were not required. This article does not contain any studies with human participants performed by any of the authors.
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