29- Agrippina the Younger, second wife of the emperor Claudius (41-54) and the mother of the emperor Nero (54-68)
The portrait shows the gradual supplanting of Julio-Claudian classicism with a more vigorous form of representation. About 60.
29 The head of Agrippina the Younger (15-59), daughter of Germanicus (no. 23), sister of Caligula (no. 24), reproduces a type representing her when she had just succeeded in A. D. 49 in marrying her uncle, the emperor Claudius and preparing the way for the succession of her son Nero (no. 30) to the throne. She appears young and idealized, as was deemed suitable for the likeness of imperial ladies since the time of Livia, but the sculptor has renderea her strictly individual features, starting with the large cheekbones and oval lower jaw, the peculiar set of the orbits and the large sensuous mouth. Her mien dissimulates the will for power that drove Agrippina’s life, giving instead a well-trained appearance of kindness. Intellect seems to govern her emotions, but this may just be the surface of a well-established social pattern. The later stages of Julio-Claudian art or, if one wishes to see it so, its return to the realistic tradition of good old Republican times, is clearly marked. The neoclassical trend favored by Augustus must have been felt as tedious and increasingly sterile. Some Flavian ladies (nos. 36-39) continue and develop further this new style, their image torn away from the pathos of imperial dignity which had become as prominent in the disseminated images of Nero’s mother as it was really in her personality.
30 The overlife-size head of Nero (54-68) appears as an amorphous, if not repulsive, caricature. One would like to imagine the sculptor sharing the feelings of hatred and despite for the incompetent tyrant which animated the Roman historians. But these aristocratic literati, like Tacitus, were expressing the judgment of the senatorial opposition, while the masses of people, especially in the Greek-speaking half of the Roman world loved the dilettante emperor dearly and mourned him after his suppression. Our head, from Asia Minor, reveals simply the lack of competence of a provincial craftsman who unintentionally travestied the latest portrait type of Nero into a blasphemy of his divine majesty. Some features of the original, and of the sitter, made this change easy. While on Nero’s latest coins the hair is raised and magnified in a fashion inspired by Alexander the Great and by effigies of gods, his face lacks utterly any divine serenity. The trend of portraiture was turning away from the ennobling classicism and Nero in his later years was becoming unpleasantly fat. However, contrary to us, the people of the Roman province Asia did not here perceive the ugly swollen figure of a tyrant, but a radiant likeness of the last direct descendant of Augustus who, in Rome, lent his features to the colossal gilded statue of Helios.
The emperor Nero (54-68)
From Asia Minor. The later type of the young emperor's iconography, representing him as semidivine, is reduced to caricature by the provincial replica. Late 60s of the first century A. D.
World History
