Colossal Head of a Divinity, restored as Isis

Roman art

This colossal head was probably the one that once decorated a fountain in the park’s third enclosure. It was mentioned in its current location in the Salone in 1832. The sculpture is heavily restored and was interpreted by the restorer as Isis, with the addition of a lotus flower above the figure’s forehead. Below the flower, there are visible traces of an ancient peg which might have been used to attach a diadem. The oval-shaped face has a broad, triangular forehead framed by wavy locks of hair parted in the middle. The elongated eyes are topped by broad eyebrows carved with a sharp edge.  The sculpture seems to have been inspired by models from the fifth century BCE. The use of the ‘bridge’ technique for the hair suggests a date of the second century CE.

Object details

Commentary

This colossal female head is almost frontal, turning only very slightly to the right. The oval face has well-defined features, a broad, triangular forehead and full cheeks that narrow below the cheekbones towards the round, prominent chin. The curve of the sharply defined brows is continuous from the swollen upper eyelid to the sides of the nose, which has a broad, flat bridge. The elongated eyes are clearly defined by deep carving. The small, full lips are partially open and turned slightly upward at the corners. The hair is crowned with a thin band and composed of a mass of symmetrical wavy curls that start from the central part and become progressively wider up to the temples, leaving the earlobes exposed. The hair ends in a low knot in the back. Long locks of hair on either side of the head seem to have escaped from the knot and rest on the figure’s chest.

The ancient part of the sculpture is limited to the front of the head, including the ears and part of the neck. The lotus flower above the forehead is entirely modern. Below it, there are visible traces of an ancient peg that might have been originally used to attach a diadem. The immense size of the head, restored as Isis, suggest that it belonged to a colossal cult statue, perhaps an acrolith, which is to say a statue with a marble head and extremities and a wooden core (Despinis 1994, pp. 39–40).

In 1700, Montelatici reported a ‘large ancient marble head, portrait of an unidentified empress’, placed ‘at the top of the pediment’ of a ‘rustic fountain in the shape of a rock’, in the third enclosure of the villa’s park, which was probably the present sculpture (p. 20). An engraving by Venturini of this fountain confirms Montelatici’s description and the presence of the head (Falda 1691, pl 14). In 1826, it was among the sculptures selected to be restored and moved inside the Palazzina Borghese, when the rooms stripped by the sale to France were rehung. The restoration was carried out by Massimiliano Laboureur, who was paid forty-five scudi for his work, which involved ‘both eyebrows, the nose, part of the mouth and part of the left cheek’. Part of the hair framing the forehead was redone and the locks on the figure’s head were made smaller (Moreno Sforzini 1987, pp. 352–353, 355). In 1832, Nibby described this colossal female head as ‘exquisitely carved [and] similar to the one in the Pio Clementino museum, but of far greater artistic quality than that one’. He considered it a portrait of the goddess Isis, for the ‘features so well known that there can be no doubt as to the subject’. But he also observed that the representation of the Egyptian divinity ‘is purely Greco-Roman, since in Egypt this goddess was portrayed in an entirely different way and with a different arrangement of attributes’ (pp. 40–41). Helbig shared this view, considering the sculpture a Hellenistic-Roman creation ‘stripped of all characteristics of the Egyptian style (1913 p. 233, nos 15-30a).

The ancient part of the hair was rendered in thin curls linked using the distinctive technique of little ‘bridges’, for which small marble connectors were spared by the drill to decorative effect.  The use of this technique suggests a date for the work in the second century CE.

Giulia Ciccarello