Portrait Statue of a Woman as Spes

Roman art

This statue depicts a standing Roman matron wearing a chiton and mantle. She holds the hem of her garment in her left hand and a patera in her right. The head, which was carved separately, stands out for its individualised physiognomy and a complex hairstyle arranged to form a multiple ‘diadem’ and a turban made of braids, similar to the hair of women from the Ulpia family but also widely found in private portraits from the Trajanic-Hadrianic period.

The iconography of the Borghese sculpture was commonly used in Rome for images of Spes, the personification of Hope, a statue of whom was displayed in the temple of the goddess in the Forum Holitorium and was later often used in the Imperial period for portrait statues as well.

Object details

Commentary

This statue depicts a standing Roman matron wearing a chiton and mantle. Her left arm is hanging down along her side and she holds the hem of her garment in her left hand, while her right arm is held out in front of her body. She holds a patera in her right hand. She is wearing a chiton with dense, oblique pleats that cover her legs, revealing the shape of her left leg, and a short, sleeved himation that comes down to her knees and is fastened with fibulae over her forearm. The head, carved separately, stands out for its individualised physiognomy and a complex hairstyle arranged to form a multiple ‘diadem’ and a turban made of braids. The diadem is composed of three parts and parted in the middle. The first part, starting from the bottom, is made up of a series of dense half-moon shaped locks, while the second and third are instead formed by facing half-moons that meet in the middle of the almond in the form of a triple pointed cusp. The turban made up of four braids adheres closely to the skull. The ‘turban’ hairstyle, composed of a crown of braids worn close to the skull like a cap, and the multi-level ‘diadem’ evoke the hairstyles worn by women in the Ulpia family. Ulpia Marciana, sister of Trajan, spread the fashion of arranging the hair in a triple diadem, which is also found in portraits of other members of the imperial family and private portraits in the Trajanic-Hadrianic period. The latter reproduced the standard style with variants on the composition and number of ‘diadems’, either using fewer of them or increasing them to four (Ambrogi 2013; Buccino 2017).

The body is modelled on the kore, a statue type widely used in the Greek world during the Archaic period to depict the offerer and the deceased. Described by Nibby (1832) as a statue of Plotina, the Borghese sculpture represents an iconographic type that was widely used in Rome (Fuellerton 1990, pp. 103–126) for images of Spes, the personification of Hope, as documented in coins issued in the Claudian and Flavian periods with a depiction of the statue from the temple of Spes in the Forum Holitorium.

 The type was often used in the Imperial period for portrait statues, as also attested by a small-scale sculpture from the Augustan period found on the Viminal Hill and now in the Capitoline collection (Centrale Montemartini, inv. on. 990; Guglielmi 2010, p. 312, no. III.23).

Jessica Clementi