Portrait of Vespasian, on a non-ancient bust

Roman art

This portrait, inserted in a non-ancient bust, depicts Vespasian, the first emperor of the Flavian dynasty, who ruled from 69 to 79 CE. The head is squarish and stocky, and the features are typical of the emperor’s portraiture: three deep lines across the forehead, small, deep-set eyes, large nostrils, a closed mouth with thin lips, a prominent chin and corpulent cheeks. The most distinctive element of this unvarnished portrait of the soldier-emperor, who rose to power when he was sixty, is, however, the figure’s baldness, with the exception of the short curly locks on the sides and very top of the head. This detail allows us to situate the Borghese sculpture within the main series of portraits of the emperor, distinguished for adherence to the trend for veristic and objective representations.

Object details

Commentary

This head, depicting a man in advanced age, has been inserted in a non-ancient, cuirassed bust wearing.

The head is squarish and stocky, and the forehead is marked by three deep lines. The small, deep-set eyes have thin eyelids and are framed by a network of wrinkles typical of portraits of Emperor Vespasian, who rose to the throne in July 699 CE, when he was sixty. The full, corpulent cheeks, wide nostrils, deep lines running from the nose to the mouth, thin, closed lips and round, prominent chin complete the list of unique physiognomic features passed down by ancient sources (Suet., Vesp. 20; Dion Cass., LXVI, 17). The most distinctive element of the iconography of the first emperor of the gens Flavia is, however, the balding head, with short, curly locks limited to the sides and very top of the head. The flattened tuft on the crown of the head emphasises the deformation of the cranium and the depth of the lines on the forehead situate the Borghese sculpture within the main group of portraits of the emperor in the round. There are about forty of them, all marked by a veristic and objective approach to portraiture that does not try to hide the unpolished features of the old soldier. The best example in the group is the Copenhagen portrait (Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, inv. 659a; Wegner 1966, pp. 10, 13, 15ff; Rosso 2009, p. 403, no. 1), due to its excellent state of preservation, extraordinary expressiveness and crude realism. This realism is significantly watered down in other copies of the type, such as the portrait in the Torlonia Collection (inv. MT 536, Scarpati 2020, p. 153, no. 10).

The sculptures in this group, which is the largest, contrast with the portraits in which the signs of age are less intense, the baldness is less pronounced and the eyebrows and hair are thinner, dignifying the features (see the examples from Ostia, Scarpati 2013, p. 166, no. 107; Lucus Feroniae, P. Aureli, G. Colugnati 2011, p. 266, no. 4.13 and the British Museum, inv. 1890). The division between realistic and idealised portraits proposed by F. Poulsen in 1914 was accepted and further developed by later scholars, including R. Bianchi Bandinelli, who argued for a division between late-republican realistic private portraiture and Julio-Claudian idealised public portraiture. The century-long debate over the chronology and typology of Vespasian’s two portrait types was recently expanded to include a new theory, according to which the ‘ennobling’ portraits precede the sovereign’s arrival in Rome and were made in the east after his acclamation by the legions and then replaced by the main type, the Haupttypus, a clear allusion to the virtues of the late-republican victors. Since he did not come from a prestigious family, Vespasian chose to represent himself as an energetic, resolute man of action, in clear antithesis to the previous Augustan and Julio-Claudian portrait tradition (Zanker 2009).

The Borghese portrait, which Nibby considered one of the best, can be dated to about 70 CE, after the emperor’s adventus in Rome, based on working method and style.

Jessica Clementi