The portrait bust inserted in a pyramid-shaped monument shows the continuation of Roman traditions under Augustus. End of the first century B. C.—early first century A. D.
9 This portrait of a man reminds us of a face from the American Midwest; he appears shrewd, weii-rooted in his iife and in the earth. Like the historicai Romans of Repubiican times, he couid have been a senator, perhaps from Nebraska. But he is not from the Repubiican period, uniess one couid continue to beiieve in the oid Repubiican institutions and rituais which Augustus kept aiive because it suited him to maintain the iiiu-sion of respublica. It is fairly possible that he did. He is a provincial and his rustic existence in Southern Italy may not have been much disturbed by the cataclysm of civil wars and the establishment of the Empire. Or perhaps like Augustus, he too may have wanted to proclaim the uninterrupted continuity of social institutions and values. Thus, stubborn and marked with age but full of vitality, he appears to us in the Republican way which his sculptor has rendered with a note of provincialism. The dry, linear treatment of the details verges on the treatment characteristic of woodcutting. The modeling is completely subservient to lines. In contrast to true Republican portraits, the death mask seems to have vanished even if the portrait was intended as a funerary monument. The head does not refer directly to imagines housed in the traditional atrium but to another custom of a head as a funerary monument, as it was known in the mixture of Greek and native traditions, for example in Tarentum. Also, the sculpture itself does not belie elements of Augustan style. The veristic, pitiless treatment of the wrinkles, the sagging dewlap, and the pouches under the eyes is tempered by a neoclassic restraint.
World History
