Published Catalogue Text: Stone Sculptures: The Greek, Roman and Etruscan Collections of the Harvard University Art Museums , written 1990
133
Man of the Late Roman Republic
The portrait is probably from a funerary bust or statue. The head is broken away irregularly at the start of the neck. The surfaces of the bald head and face are weathered. Ears, nose, and mouth have suffered likewise. The circles of the pupils were carved lightly and must have been finished in paint. Drill points mark the inner corners of the eyes and outer corners of the mouth. The head is worked all around, indicating it came from a free-standing ensemble rather than a tomb monument with figures in high relief.
A similar sculpture, the old soldier Publius Gessius, from a three-person family tomb-relief in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, is more drawn in his facial features, and has the same lightly carved eyes finished with paint. The man in Boston, carved in limestone-like Italian marble, shows something of the same ethos on a cruder level. The portrait in Palombino from Rome has a nearly similar delineation of the inner corners of the eyes and the outer ends of the mouth (Comstock, Vermeule, 1976, pp. 200-202, nos. 319-321).
The date suggested, 50-30 B.C., may be a decade or two too early, although this head belongs without any doubt to the decades before the classicism of the Augustan age influenced private portraiture. Roman tomb-reliefs with older people in this veristic style and younger persons in the new fashions based on the Polykleitan to Hellenistic Greek tradition indicate such a stylistic shift was in full swing by about 2 BC (Richter, 1948, nos. 2, 3, 4 [veristic style], nos. 5, 6 [Augustan influences]). The head, however, belongs to the most "fact-bound" style of late Roman Republican portraiture. While Greek sculptors had carved such heads on ideal bodies at Delos and elsewhere in places where Roman clientele settled, the origins of this portraiture combined Egyptian taste and traditions of carving with the conventional Roman leaning to truth and simplicity and directness in representing specific individuals. Such concepts of portraiture can be traced back through Italic art to Etruscan funerary monuments around 300 B.C.
Cornelius Vermeule and Amy Brauer
