The project « EIKON – Das Leben griechischer Bildnisse/ The Life of Greek Portraits » brings together a research group of Franco-German specialists in the sciences of Antiquity and in particular classical archaeology. The research subject deals with portrait statues from the fifth to the first century BC, whose omnipresence has had an important impact on the visual culture of Ancient Greece. The erection of statues, a topic which has often been addressed in research, is not the main subject of our research. For the first time, it is the “life” of the portraits from their erection to their destruction which constitutes the main subject (and not a marginal one). The “life”of the portraits is the processing of their transformations, their appropriations, their semantic evolutions and their successive re-contextualisations through ritual acts, repairs, reutilizations, new exhibitions etc. It means studying the dynamic processes of transmission, of reception and of the changes that characterise Greek portraits. They must be understood in their communication, cultural and socio-political contexts. This project combines systematic and paradigmatic studies. Its innovatory character lies in the problematic which, for the first time, is not about circumstances and primary messages but about the concrete (re)utilization of ancient portraits and thus contributes to highlight clearly the process of their cultural and communication function. With a modern approach of the study of portraits, the project combines a contextual study and a systematic mixture of witness accounts and archaeological perspectives, epigraphs and histories that bring us to confront in a critically analytic way the very different scientific traditions from France and Germany. Two principal perspectives stand out: the actual study of the statues (the “practices of the portrait”), like coronations, repairs, honorific customs etc., and the conditions of reception that change throughout time in different reutilizations, different exhibition contexts and medium (which is “re-contexualisation”). The results of the project will be presented in monographs on particular aspects yet unexplored in this field of studies. A complete and systematic publication will also present the results in the form of a handbook. Moreover, a complete database which will be available for future research on portraits will be created with the collaboration of the École française d’Athènes. This database will gather all witness accounts about ancient portraits in Delos, one of the most important sites for the study of Greek portraits. The results of studies in two urban sites of major importance for contextual research on portrait statues, Delos and Pergamon, will be confronted in a symposium which will be followed by a publication. In Delos and Pergamon, French and German institutions have been leading archaeological explorations for a long time. Thus, a case study about the functions and the “life” of portraits in two major urban centers of the Hellenistic world, studied by groups of researchers of German and French traditions, will be underlined. .