The ancient Greeks were the real pioneers of individuality as we perceive it today and of the artistic vision of the individual, realized in the art of the portrait. However, the Greeks tolerated public monuments, even for their ranking citizens, rather reluctantly and only after their death—at times the direct result of community action, the most illustrious case being the Athenian democracy that first forced Socrates to drink hemlock and later erected a statue of him in repentance.
In the fifth and fourth centuries B. G., the great age of the Greek city states, portrait sculptors greatly enhanced the actual appearance of famous people by avoiding the trivial, the momentary, signs of aging, emotion, or psychology. Such marks were restricted to socially less acceptable figures, both mythological and real—satyrs, centaurs, ghosts, barbarians, slaves—sometimes reflecting the darker side of the Greek soul. The image of a Greek citizen, in public monuments dedicated by the community or by descendants, was heroized and ennobled by comparison with the immortal gods. It was Alexander the Great (356-323 B. C.) who first adopted the Near Eastern tradition of erecting godlike images of himself, often colossal in scale, in order to foster propagandistic legends of divine legitimacy. His successors and later the Roman imitators (fig. l) followed this example. Also from Alexander’s time on, the declining Greek cities permitted a multiplication and accompanying devaluation of public honorific images, together with an increase of monuments to the illustrious men of the past. But even though the interest in individual appearance thus increased in the Hellenistic era, the monumental and idealized character of Greek portraits remained basically the same.
Greek sculpture may seem cold, distant, and in a way threatening to the modern viewer. At its best, it calls forth the identification of the viewer and the viewed: the victorious athlete the Getty Bronze can, in a good moment, communicate the feelings that it was you, too, who won at Olympia. Roman portraits seem just the opposite, partly because they look so much like real people we see every day. This man (no. 9) reminds me of the secretary of the museum, and that lady (no. 13) is the aunt who was not an intellectual but who made wonderful Christmas cookies. They are framed in their time by fashions of hair and beards, but with today’s variety of hair styles and beard lengths, even this is. not an insurmountable obstacle for awakening a spontaneous feeling of intimacy with them.
It is, nevertheless, a wrong sensation. Although to some extent Roman portraits are personal and individual, to a much larger degree they perpetuate the social and fashion stereotypes of their times. 'We remember how individual our friends were in high school, but a glance at another’s school yearbook will im-
Figure 2. Lid of an Etruscan cinerary um with reclining man. Limestone, style of Volterra. Second century B, C. The head is much more a generic image than a portrait. Getty Museum, 7I. AA.262.
Mediately reveal how everyone looks the same. It is an effect of the same time and the same photographer. What we actually see in Roman portraits is, of course, not the likeness of a real individual of flesh and blood but a social stereotype transmitted by the sculptor. The traditions of workmanship and the style and fashions of a generation provide the appearance which attracts us as actual likeness. However, this does not mean that our fascination is wrong. It helps us to establish human contact by the vehicle of art. Right or wrong, it nourishes the feeling that humanity remains one in the changing kaieidoscope of history.
THE ROMAN REPUBLIC
Figure 3. Head of an old fisherman. Roman replica after a Hellenistic prototype. The strongly characterized features show how the Hellenistic genre statues were a starting point for Roman portraits. In the Renaissance, the piece was often used as a representation of the dying Seneca.
Vatican Museum.
The private portrait as we understand it was first developed by the Romans. Literary sources relate how when a prominent Roman died, he was escorted by a funeral procession to the Rostra in the Forum, where a son or other relative delivered a public eulogy recounting his virtues.
After this, having buried him and performed the customary rites, they place a portrait of the deceased in the most prominent part of the house, enclosing it in a small wooden aedicular shrine. The portrait is a mask which is wrought with the utmost attention being paid to preserving a likeness in regard to both its shape and contour. Displaying these portraits at public sacrifices, they honor them in a spirit of emulation, and when a prominent member of the family dies, they carry them in the funeral procession, putting them on men who seem most like the deceased in size and build. . . . One could not easily find a sight finer than this for a young man who was in love with fame and goodness. For is there anyone who would not be edified by seeing these portraits of men who were renowned for their excellence and by having them all present as if they were living and breathing?
Amazingly, this is the account of a Greek, Polybios (VI, 53) the great historian of the second century B. C. who came to Rome as a hostage and became a sincere admirer of Rome and Roman customs. The educational side of this practice was extended in the Empire to all great men of the past, Greek or Roman, and statues of them, with tablets recording their deeds were set up on the sides of the Forum of Augustus (31 B. C.-A. D. 14) and later, in the Forum Transitorium by Alexander Severus (222-235).
Funerary images had long existed in different parts of Italy, especially among the Etruscans who exercised a deep influence on early Rome (see fig. 2, nos. 3, 4). Under the influence of the Greek Hellenistic world, the Romans raised their sepulchral images to the level of artistic portraits. The craftsmen-sculptors serving the Romans were mostly of Greek origin, but they did not take their inspiration from the idealizing Greek portrait tradition but rather from the repertoire of genre characters popular since the late third century B. C. (fig. 3). Such sculptures, often slightly humorous, could emphasize age, occupation, strong movement, and emo-
Tions of their lower class subjects. Roman patrons did not desire classical beauty in their portraits: more important to them was expression of their concern for the res publica, the welfare of the state, combined with a naked admission of their aspiration for power. This characterization may occasionally appear under the idealized features borrowed from Hellenistic rulers (no. 1) , but is more often seen under a rude, toothless face mercilessly exposing a rustic shrewdness (see nos. 9, 11). Indeed, the noble Romans of the Republic seem to have preferred this almost crude type of depiction not only for themselves but even for their wives (no. 12).
Because of this character, one might be inclined to view Roman portraits as private creations. Nothing is farther from the truth. Their function was basically social and their audience the entire city. For example, the statue of a man from the late first century B. C. in the Museo Capitolino Nuovo in Rome wears the toga Candida (fig. 4) to show that he is seeking election to public office and holds busts of his father and his grandfather to help establish the legitimacy of his claim. This preference for the most veristic trend in Roman portraiture can also be traced in Roman coins of the first century B. C., where ancestral images of the old families of the establishment are reproduced. Indeed, this corresponds well to a statement in Pliny that the aristocracy in Rome had a special privilege—ius honorum et imaginum—the right to supreme offices and to possession of ancestral images, the latter justifying the former. The same author adds sed plebs non habet gentes, “but the common people lack venerable ancestry.”
However, by the later first century B. C., the use of funerary portraits was widespread by all strata of the Roman population. These often mass-produced images all share a standard craftsmanlike level, but the repetition of similar features belies the apparent concern for real likeness. Inscriptions reveal that not only the plebian citizens but even foreigners settled in Rome and freedmen, former slaves, were made to look like the most respectable senators (no. 10). The unifying factor is their civismus, their dedication, whether real or fictitious, to the res publica. Some archaeologists label this harvest of funerary reliefs with stereotyped portraits as the plebeian trend in Roman art. Such a sociological approach may be interesting, but it seems to neglect the fact that the roots of the movement are in the veristic portraits of the old nobility. Rather than a new trend, there seems instead to be a wider diffusion of established values down the social scale at this time. The trend continued in the early Empire, but its ethos became more and more an empty schema. Instead portraits, particularly ones with artistic pretensions, appear less as citizens and more as private individuals.
The vogue of portraits in the Roman Republic was not limited to funerary images. Following a well-established Greek tradition, images were set up by individuals themselves, by their heirs, or by any kind of private
Figure 4. Marble statue of a Roman (head ancient but alien) in the toga Candida, holding the busts of his father and grandfather. The work belongs to the end of the first century B. C. Rome, Museo Capitolino Nuovo. Photo: German Archaeological Institute, Rome.
Or public institution—religious, commercial, or legal authorities—in countless public places. The pretext was usually votive, but the intention was really honorary, denoting the status of the represented and his family. As early as 158 B. C., the crowd of statues in the Roman Forum was so great that the censors decreed that any not dedicated by the Senate must be removed. At the same time, other centers in Italy, even minor ones, followed the example of Rome in the proliferation of both funerary and honorary portraiture. Thus some scholars detect the influence of Roman art’s ruthless verism even in late Etruscan art. There is also no doubt that the last century of the Roman Republic, with its intricate network of ties with the Greek world, produced complex relationships in art production. Most of the sculptors of Roman portraits must have been of Greek or Greek-educated origin, as was true for most other artists and craftsmen in Rome.
The artists themselves undoubtedly followed different traditions. A neoclassical revival before the middle of the first century is associated with the sculptor Pasiteles, who was originally from Magna Graecia, and is one example of a trend that clearly continued into early imperial times. Other features link Roman art, even in portraiture, with another type of neoclassical production from the so-called Attic school. Another school of art, via the island of Delos, may point toward origins in Asia Minor or Rhodes. There are even occasional striking affinities with the art of Alexandria, which enhanced its version of Hellenism with the achievements of the perennial Egyptian tradition (for example, no. 31) and may, according to some specialists, have produced fruitful connections with late Republican Roman portraits.
While it is universally recognized that imperial portraits survive in many copies, and even in copies of copies of varying quality, it may be surprising to note that very few originals of Republican portraits are known. Most of these venerable effigies are known only in first or second century A. D. replicas. This should emphasize the fact that the main function of the portrait was as part of ancestor galleries. As the great Roman families grew and intermarried, there was a constant need to renew and duplicate portraits of ancestors. Sometimes a definite hint of this procedure is apparent as the shape of a bust is modified to suit new fashions. More often one can only guess at the duplication on the basis of subtle changes in the style as a portrait was modified by the copyist in the light of his own time.
IMPERIAL PORTRAITS
The establishment of the Empire created a new category in Roman portraiture, the images of the emperor and his family. Today in traditional democracies the changing of the chief executive is marked in official buildings by the replacement of one modest photograph by another. Under different skies, countless overwhelming portraits of charismatic leaders are considered necessary for the enthusiasm of the masses. In a few surviving monarchies, the image of the ruler continues the tradition of the annointed kings. All these customs are not new. They reach far back into antiquity, where effigies of divine pharaohs and Near Eastern rulers were an important part of the religious framework of the whole social system, while the emperors of Rome achieved such superhuman status only with the decline of the Empire.
Even at the dawn of the Roman Republic, victorious generals and ambitious men are recorded to have dedicated their images in sanctuaries and public places. By the last years of the Republic in the first century B. C., the countless statues of the dictator Caesar were the subject of polemics and public execration when they were adorned with royal insignia. Caesar’s successor, Augustus, accepted the cult of himself associated with the goddess Roma in the eastern provinces, where the worship of the ruler was already established in the old Hellenistic kingdoms. Over the next century, the imperial cult spread across the Empire. Augustus deified Caesar and received the same honor himself after his passing. The portraits of emperors who were deified continued to be venerated, forming a kind of pantheon of the Empire. As a group and as individuals, they received supplementary adornment and even special priesthoods charged with the imperial cult (like no. 7).
The backbone of the Pax Romana was, of course, the Roman army, which carried the image of the ruling emperor as part of its military regalia. A statue, or at least a bust, often of precious metal, was housed in the sanctuary of each legion. Military decorations and insignia often included a medallion miniature bust of the ruler. Thus, in the case of a rebellion, the first thing to happen in the barracks was to tear down the images of the ruling emperor and erect the image of the pretender. Eor symbolic reasons, sacrifices were made to the image of the emperor before the opening of courts of law or official activities, and on the frontiers a barbarian leader fell on his knees in ceremonial adoration before the image of the emperor as a sign of submission.
All over the Empire, the portraits of the ruling emperor and sometimes those of his illustrious predecessors were erected in public places. This honor was not limited to the emperor himself; it included to a lesser degree his family, wife, and children, and especially the heir apparent. Such statues were not usually erected by official decree but most often by the voluntary activity of civic groups, guilds, or veterans associations that would adorn a square, a basilica, or a library with sculptures of the emperor and his family as a gesture of loyalty. The administration might then reduce taxes or donate public money to build an aqueduct or listen to some specific grievances, but nevertheless the core of the gesture was spontaneous. The number of portraits in public places must therefore have been enormous. In the late second century A. D., M. Fronto wrote his former pupil Marcus Aurelius (no. 6l)) that he must be tired if not annoyed to be constantly meeting with his
Figure 5. The emperor Marcus Aurelius. Gold bust of provincial
Workmanship. Late 170’s. Aven-ches, Museum (Switzerland).
Figure 6. Portrait of the very old emperor Trajan on a bronze shield image. 117-118. Ankara, Archaeological Museum.
Own likeness everywhere. The philosopher-emperor replied with true stoic acceptance.
Dissemination of the official prototype gave the Empire not only the image of the emperor and the way he should be venerated but also official court art, which then influenced local artistic production in many fields, especially in private portraiture. In this way, the influence of the imperial effigy went much deeper than the art itself. The loyal subject wanted to look like the emperor or his wife, which included not only the hairstyle and fashion of beard but also the presentation of personality (see especially no. 80). The influence of female portraits of the imperial house may have gone still deeper, as they represented the height of contemporary fashion in their hairstyle and general appearance. These fashions can aid the archaeologists in establishing chronology, but they provide their own difficulties; a third century man can wear a beard popular in the second century and one should not be confused by it (see for example, the difference of two generations in no. 66). A lady, however, could be faithful to the intricate hairstyle of her youth more than half a century later (as perhaps nos. 13 and 81).
How were the Imperial portraits made? A court sculptor may have had free access to the emperor and his family on occasion, but this does not presuppose a sitting in the modern sense. Sight and memory were honed stronger and sharper in antiquity, as among certain tribes living closer to nature than Western man. So the artist would catch the essence of his subject and express it within the framework of artistic tradition and ideology of the time. The result would be officially approved in Rome, possibly even by the emperor himself, and then replicas would be dispersed throughout the provinces of the Empire. The barbarian West and central Europe received a good many effigies directly from Italy, particularly bronzes but also marbles carved either in local Italian Carrara or imported Pentelic marble from Attica, or, later in Asia Minor marble. Some crude copies were produced in local stone or bronze in the West, but in the civilized East, with its centuries of Hellenized life, local workshops produced most of the countless replicas for themselves and even for some neighboring areas like the South Balkans. The techniques involved are described with a valued unfinished portrait, no. 34. Of course, the most important portraits were in precious metal. Certain megalomaniac emperors are recorded, like Domitian (Suetonius, XIII, 2) as permitting “no statues to be set up in his honor unless they were of gold or silver and were of a certified weight.” Very, very few of them survive, for obvious reasons. There is, however, a bust of Lucius Verus in silver, clearly the product of a skilled workshop in Rome itself but found in North Italy, and a gold bust of Marcus Aurelius from Switzerland (fig. 5), indisputably executed by a local craftsman.
The portrait sculptor considered himself much less an artist than an artisan, like the other stonecutters and bronze founders who reproduced the imperial image in countless replicas. This is why most of the numerous
Surviving imperial portraits are of lesser quality than contemporary private portraits. The latter are originals, the former mostly copies. Only a few rare originals of imperial portraits survive; they are, however, mostly local products and not necessarily great artistic achievements. The golden bust of Marcus Aurelius from Switzerland is poor both as a work of art and as a portrait, but a bronze tondo in Ankara (fig. 6), a form which the Romans called an imago clipeata (shield image), with a bust of Trajan, is a unique and unsurpassed masterpiece. The local sculptor must have been impressed by the sight of the aged emperor and successfully caught his own perception of Trajan’s physical presence, impressive and thrilling even for the modern viewer.
COINS
The very first and most numerous category of imperial portraits is coins. In this respect, the Caesars followed the well-established tradition of Hellenistic kings in disseminating the image and message of the ruler. In the last century of the Republic, the magistrates supervising the mint started to include likenesses of their ancestors on the city’s coins as an expression of family pride (fig. 7). Julius Caesar was the first individual to assume the prerogative of striking his own profile in his lifetime (fig. 8). He was followed immediately by his assassins, those supposedly deep-seated Republicans, and then by Augustus and all the succeeding emperors. The portraits are usually struck on the obverse of each coin; the reverse has a figural device with an appropriate motto of imperial propaganda, often with involuntarily sarcastic overtones (when two imperial brothers proclaim their concordia, you can be sure that sooner or later one will murder the other; when the Concordia of the army is vaunted, the Roman world is on the brink of military rebellion). Coins are an estimable source for Roman history, and the portraits on them provide a well-dated series of official images which aid in the identification of portraits in other media. Here the gradually decreasing importance of actual likeness is clearly documented. In the first two centuries of the Empire, the identification of sculptured portraits of most imperial figures is well established, with the exception of some younger princes. In the third century and later, however, the features of many ephemeral emperors or pretenders are confusing. Often the die with a precursor’s profile might be used, especially at a provincial mint, with a simple change of the legend—eloquent sign that the real likeness was quite unimportant. From the fourth century on, even identification is difficult, as the coin portraits propagandize unchanging stability in a world fomented by perpetual and violent transition. The same is true of portraits in all other media.
Figure 7. Stiver denarius with portrait of the tribune Antius Restio, struck by his descendant C. Antius Restio in 46 B. C. Photo: B. Schweitzer, Bildniskunst, fig. 87.
Figure 8. Silver denarius with portrait of Gains Julius Caesar, struck in the first half of February 44 B. C. by M. Mettius. Photo: A. Alfoldi, Caesar in 44 v. Chr., pi. 7.17.
Figure 9. Mummy portrait of a boy. Encaustic on wood panel. Middle of the second century A. D. Getty Museum, 78.Al.262.
PAINTED PORTRAITS
Few painted imperial portraits survive, and Roman mural paintings provide only a hint of the quality in private painted portraits. But they must have been nearly as widespread as sculpted ones. One Roman province, Egypt, is unique in furnishing numerous examples of painted images (figs. 9 and 10). Sometime after the beginning of the Roman occupation, the Egyptian way of handling the mummified bodies of the deceased was modified. At first, the traditional plaster and cartonnage masks placed over the head of the mummy were replaced by wooden planks with painted portraiture—either in encaustic technique or, especially later, in tempera. Less often, the image of the deceased was painted directly on the linen shroud. The mummies must have been preserved in some instances for a long period of time in the family home, as evidenced by some excavated mummies which had been damaged by children’s scrawls and later repaired. When the emotional interest in the deceased declined, the mummy was discarded more often than properly buried. Good portraits were at this time often removed from the linen wrappings to be hung on the wall. Some of these images seem to have been copied or adapted from previously painted portraits from life, but most must have been done on the occasion of death. All of them are products of local craftsmen: they show competence but little artistic potential. At first glance, these portraits look alive and individual, but on closer examination, the individual and actual likeness is reduced to a kind of expressive stereotype. However, they are the best we have of ancient portrait painting and by their appearance and occasional paraphernalia show the curious syncretism of Egyptian religious traditions: mummy image, Hellenistic painting, and Roman perception of the individual.
STATUES AND BUSTS
There are basically two categories of three dimensional portraits: statues and busts. To the Romans, the head was the real essence of the portrait. This explains the existence of many heads made separately for insertion into nude or draped statue bodies, where the body was seen as just a support and reproduced a standard, often Greek, prototype (see no. 51 where statue and head both survive). How many emperors and private Roman citizens appeared in a Polykleitan scheme? How many Roman ladies were shown as the Large or Small Herculaneum Women? This standardization is essentially un-Greek, for the classical Greek sculptor perceived face and body and pose as a cohesive whole. The shift in attitude reduced the work of Roman portraitists to the head and allowed the client to choose a body that suited his taste. The practice also allowed the combination of different materials: often the drapery of a statue or even of a bust could be of colorful marble to set off the white flesh areas. The changes in hair fashions also found expression: from the second
Figure 10. Mummy portrait of a man holding a flower crown and a chalice. Tempera on wood panel. End of the third century A. D. Getty Museum, 79.Al.142.
Half of the second century A. D. on, we know examples of faces made separately from the hair which could be attached like a stone wig and changed on the arrival of a new fashion (see no. 75).
The most frequent shape used for Roman portraits and the most economical was the bust. They were made to be exhibited mostly in niches or in some architectural frame. The back of the bust itself (even of the head) was often not completely finished because it was not meant to be seen. In the time of the Republic, the bust extended to just below the neck. By the late first century B. C., it commonly included the collarbones (no. 17); and in the first century A. D., a deeper, triangular section (no. 18). About 100, not only the complete shoulders but the tops of the upper arms were shown, and the base followed the contours of the large pectoral muscles. Soon after, busts commonly extended to the navel (no. 65) and the upper arms were clearly modeled, but already in the early third century the lower abdomen and complete arms were sometimes carved. However: earlier types of busts sometimes were used in later times. Their variety reflects basic statue types: the cuirassed bust, draped bust (sometimes with veiled head), and nude bust. Statues were made with portrait heads inserted into idealized bodies of one or another type, which bear no relation to the physique of the individual represented. With no intended humor, emperors and their wives, as well as private individuals, could be represented as gods and goddesses. The same tradition today lets us view with equanimity a modern (eighteenth to twentieth century) statesman with the body of a nude Greek athlete. It is, however, astonishing to modern eyes to see females of the imperial house who had their dignified, middle-aged faces attached to the bodies of youthful, nude Venuses. The assumption of divinity is strong here. Some early emperors chose to appear as godlike statue types, as Jupiter and Herakles (Nero erected a seventy-foot high gilded colossus of himself as Helios), and later on as popular oriental divinities. From the fourth century onwards, the emperors often appeared as the annointed vicars of god on earth.
In the early Empire, imperial portraits were usually life-size, or slightly larger for public monuments or large spaces. Colossal scale was rare in the first century, except for megalomaniac individuals like Nero (no. 30) or Domitian (no. 34), but they became more and more frequent with time. By the end of the third century, statues close to twenty feet tall were not at all uncommon. The portrait of an emperor was characterized as such, be it statue or bust, by several external insignia, some of them reserved exclusively for emperors or heirs apparent, some of them shared with other dignitaries. Thus the preserved capite velati (portraits with a fold of the toga over the head) characterize any priest, while the lituus (a short stick terminating in a volute) is an insignia of the augurs, a respectable college of seers presided over by the emperor. Cuirass and paludamentum (a triumphal cloak) were reserved to imperatores, victorious generals, in the Republic, but during the Empire they were exclusively the garb of the supreme ruler (no. 35). Different crowns existed, from laurel and oak leaves to ears of wheat, designating members of different religious colleges, to the ray crowns originally an attribute of the gods and used from time to time by some tyrannical individuals of the first century like Nero or Domitian. They regularly adorn living emperors from the third century on (see no. 86).
Insertion heads allowed frequent and inexpensive reuse of statues and loyal updating of a long-lived sovereign’s image. A few examples even exist of reused portrait heads. It happened, especially in later antiquity, that a portrait, even of a “good” emperor, could be recut to be used under another name for another imperial likeness (see also no. 15). This is not to say anything about the emperors whose memory was offi-cialy cursed {damnatio memoriae) like Nero, Domitian, or Elagabalus. Their images were broken and mistreated, and even their names were erased from inscriptions (see also no. 79).
CONCLUSION
Many historical periods and cultures have lived through progressive cycles of interest in the artistic portrait. Others were never interested in it at all, and others, like our own, have replaced it with mechanical means of capturing individual appearance. The Roman portrait developed and flourished in the last two centuries of the Roman Republic. It peaked in the first two centuries A. D., the first two centuries of the Empire. The third century marked its disintegration; the fourth, its decadence. This, of course, does not imply the decadence of Roman art as a whole, but only that the new community consciousness put less and less weight on the individual and his appearance. As late Roman society sought more and more for spiritual values, actual likeness, whether real or fictitious, was taken less into account. The soul being perceived as superior to the body, the portrait was condemned, since it is hard to reflect a man’s soul in stone or on panel.
Very often this evolution is connected with the advent of Christianity. It is true that as the heir of some Near Eastern, specifically Jewish, ideas, Christianity did not regard the visual arts favorably at the outset. But the trend toward spirituality in Roman art existed prior to the wide diffusion of Christianity and surely prior to its adoption as the official religion of the late Roman state.
The end of antiquity was not the end of the Roman portrait tradition. Attempts at revivals immediately followed. Imperial images inspired the official iconography of Charlemagne (800-814) and his successors; later, Frederick II Hohenstaufen (1194-1260). The imitation was so close that the portraits of this time may be easily mistaken for Roman. In the fifteenth-century Renaissance in Tuscany, Roman Republican portraits inspired a masterful vision of the new individual, like the so-called Niccolo d’Uzzano by Donatello, and the great Roman public monuments paved the way to his equestrian statue of Gattamelata. Renaissance medals looked consciously backward to the masterpieces of Roman monetary portraiture. This classicizing and specifically Roman-inspired art continued through the Baroque period. At the end of the eighteenth century, it received new impetus from the French Revolution seeking roots in the Roman Republic and still more from the fascinating personality of Napoleon finding the proper medium for his propaganda in Augustan portraiture. Napoleon’s time perhaps also created the image of the very youthful Augustus as a kind of retrospective. Celebrities of the nineteenth century continued this trend, but even recent twentieth-century imagery, while apparently rejecting tradition, often retains the Roman bust shape and emulates the penetrating psychology and irresistible ethos of Republican heroes.
Western history’s fascination with Roman portraits thus has a very long tradition. It also has its reverse side. Since the Renaissance, imitations and forgeries of Roman effigies have been current. The word “forgeries” is not really an appropriate designation; early on many collectors desired complete series of the twelve Caesars, according to the canonical set established by Suetonius’s biographies, or of great literary figures (no. 96). Missing portraits could be added to genuine ancient heads by contemporary sculptors, and complete sets were manufactured to order (see no. 97) following recognized iconographies. Even the early nineteenth century tried to place its own leaders in the Roman dress of great men of the past, sometimes so accurately that a misunderstanding on the part of a modern archaeologist is possible. The constitution of the art market and widespread museum and private collecting have also produced a need that has been satisfied in more recent years by more or less competent forgeries (see nos. 97-100). When recognized, these works represent not only a tribute to the mastery of Roman portraitists but also present interesting documents on how modern times see the Romans as individuals captured by art. All in all, we still return today with admiration and affection to the images struck in metal or carved in marble, whether anonymous or associated with the great names of antiquity, for the spirit and the grandeur that was Rome.
World History
