Statue of a togate man with a (not original) head of Menander

Roman art

This statue of a man, of unknown provenance, portrays a togate man putting his weight on his left leg, while his right leg is slightly bent and moved to the side. The figure is wearing a tunic and a generous toga virilis that is wrapped around his body, forming a wide sinus that extends to the knee. He holds up a length of the drapery near his hip in his right hand, while another length is draped over his left forearm. He holds a volumen in his right hand. The handling of the drapery is typical of the early imperial period and suggests a date in the late Claudian period. The head, which is not original, portrays a man in mature age with sunken eyes, dark circles, parallel lines across his forehead, to the sides of his nose and at his temples. One of at least seventy replicas, the head fits the iconographic type of portraits of Menander, the greatest exponent of New Comedy. The portrait was made after the writer’s death (293–292 BCE) for the bronze monument erected in Athens in the theatre of Dionysus and sculpted by the sons of Praxiteles, Kephisodotos and Timarchos. The Borghese sculpture, of the realistic type (which was more directly connected to the archetype and attested uninterruptedly over time), can be dated to the first century CE.

Object details

Commentary

This sculpture, of unknown provenance, was mentioned for the first time in the guide published by Nibby in 1832, although he did not distinguish the portrait head from the statue of a togate man it is inserted in, like the anonymous author of the Indicazione, who simply described it as a statue of a togate man.

It portrays a togate man putting his weight on his left leg, while his right leg is slightly bent and moved to the side. The figure is wearing a tunic and a generous toga virilis that is wrapped around his body, forming a wide sinus that extends to the knee. He holds up a length of the drapery near his hip in his right hand, while another length is draped over his left forearm. He holds a volumen in his right hand. The balteus extends diagonally in dense folds from the right side up over the left shoulder, while the small umbo emerges from the balteus in the usual ‘U’ shape. The style of the drapery of the togate Borghese statue (corresponding to the Ba type in the Goette classification) was popular during the Augustan period and, although attestations are rare, continued to be used beyond the Severan period. The handling of the drapery is typical of the early Imperial period. The dense series of pleats of the generous garment, which has an overfold on the roll that cross over the body on the front, is similar to that of drapery carved in Greek and Asian workshops during the Tiberian and Claudian periods (see Tiberius as Pontifex Maximus and Claudius as Zeus on Olympus). The influence of the Hellenistic tradition is found on the Borghese statue in the attention paid to making the toga visible beneath the fabric of the tunic.

The head, which is not original, portrays a man of mature age. He has a wide forehead, sunken eyes and a slightly open mouth that partially reveals his teeth. His hair falls sinuously over his forehead. The curls behind his ears on the left and right are combed forward from the back of the head. The hair at the temples is fuller than that on the forehead and falls in front of the ears. The face shows the age of the sitter: sunken eyes with dark circles, parallel lines on the forehead, to the sides of the nose and at the temples.

The head, one of at least seventy replicas, was tentatively identified by Bernoulli (1901) as Cicero or Pompey and by Crome (1935; 1952) as Virgil. It is instead perfectly in line with the iconographic type of portraits of Menander, the greatest exponent of New Comedy. The portrait was made after the writer’s death (293-292 BCE) for the bronze monument erected in Athens in the theatre of Dionysus and sculpted by the sons of Praxiteles, Kephisodotos and Timarchos (Richter 1965, pp. 227–229; Fittschen 1991).

The first scholar to recognise the portrait of the Greek writer Menander in Roman sculptures was F. Studniczka, who included the Borghese replica on his list of copies. The argument for identifying the head as a Virgil generated major debate in the field of archaeological hermeneutics, which ended only with the publication of a bronze bust with the name of Menander on the base in the Getty Museum (Ashmole 1973).

The monument was fully reconstructed by K. Fittschen at the Archaeological Museum of the University of Göttingen, where a bust from the Seminario Patriarcale, Venice – which preserves part of the drapery – was united with a headless body at the Museo Nazionale, Naples, and set on a copy of the base (Fittschen 1991). This reconstruction, which has been widely accepted, allows us to examine the monument in detail. The writer had a shaven face and was represented seated and wearing an undergarment, unusual details since considered an explicit allusion to a love for luxury and the poet’s pro-Macedonian stance (Palagia 2005; Persano 2016).

The iconography of the subject, which survived until late antiquity, developed in two different directions: one ‘realistic’, the other ‘classicist’. The first trend, which is more directly connected to the archetype and attested uninterruptedly over time, was joined in the early Imperial period by a variation with features closer to Augustan and Julio-Claudian portraiture. The Borghese sculpture, of the realistic type, can be dated to the first century CE.

Jessica Clementi