Terracotta Portrait Bust of a Roman Lady, 2nd Cent. AD: is she an Empress?

My first impression was Ladybird Johnson. Nice addition whoever it is.

 

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Gee, I remember Ladybird Johnson well, and she didn't look one bit like that. Especially her hair!

 

That was the first impression that crossed my mind. I am not claiming it as a fact. I did look her up and you are correct. Didn't mean to confuse anyone.

 

..i'm not sure who it is a bust of, but its a great piece and would compliment any collection...

 

Definitely a 160s CE hairstyle in the style of an Antonine woman.

Most similar to Beckmann's type 7 coiffure.


Faustina II, AD 147-175.
Roman Æ As, 8.31 g, 25.2 mm, 5 h.
Rome, AD 161-164.
Obv: FAVSTINA AVGVSTA, bare-headed and draped bust, right.
Rev: HILARITAS S C, Hilaritas standing left, holding long palm-branch in right hand and cornucopia in left hand.
Refs: RIC 1643 var.; BMCRE 982 var.; Cohen 113 var.; RCV 5296; MIR 15-7/10b.
Notes: This coin is a variety of the RIC, BMCRE and Cohen specimens in that Faustina wears no strands of pearls in the hair. The empress' coiffure on this coin is a bare-headed variety of Beckmann's type 7 hairstyle (p. 90); the British Museum specimen depicts her with the expected type 9, variety 9b style.

 

Thanks so much! Do you see a facial resemblance as well? And have you ever read anything at all suggesting that Faustina II had any sort of issue with her eyes?

 

Actually, with the way the hair is parted in the midline and combed down and forward, it's more like the type 8 hairstyle, used ON COINS simultaneously with the type 7.

 

Thanks again. Whether the bust was intended to represent Faustina II herself or some patrician lady imitating her hairstyle at a particular time, I wonder if the sculptor of the mold -- whether he was sitting in Tunisia, or the bust was made in Rome and exported to Africa -- used coins as his model. That would seem more likely to me than the idea that the "palace" issued updated marble busts for public display every time the Empress updated her hairstyle.

 

I suspect that just as women all over the US adopted the Jennifer Aniston hairstyle in the late 1990s, women all over the Roman empire adopted the Faustina coiffure. This would have been most widely popularized through coin portraits, in all likelihood.

 

Whoever it is, it's an amazing piece - congratulations! I think the fact that it was molded rather than sculpted goes right to your idea of mass-production for the general population - maybe a sort of souvenir of some kind.

 

I have nothing to add......except I love it.

All my spending money goes into coins, but if I had some left over, would love to own a piece like that.

 

I had never seen before such thing as a Roman imperial terracotta mini-bust. Do you know any parallels, in museums or private collections?

 

@DonnaML......What a wonderful piece!...Love the curvature at the back and the remains of the white slip really makes the details 'zing'!...How will you store it?

.....Anyone thought about Plautilla?

 

@Spaniard, I'll store it inside a glass bell jar/dome, like so many of my other antiquities. I just ordered one for it -- it barely fits in the one extra one I have, and looks very cramped. She needs a little more space to breathe!

Plautilla is certainly a possibility as well. The problem with trying to identify a statue from coins is that none of them show the person in full-face, only in profile. So it's difficult to tell, which is why I'm sometimes skeptical of the identifications of even large marble or bronze statues as being particular emperors.

 

I thought about Plautilla, but the hairstyle on @DonnaML's figure doesn't have that full-on "melonenfrisur" (watermelon hairstyle) seen on Plautilla's statuary and early coins. Rather, the hairstyle includes a front portion with horizontal waves, not braids, and a rear portion consisting of hair parted in the middle and combed down and forward. That's not compatible with Plautilla's coiffure.

 

I wish I did -- five minutes of googling yielded nothing quite like it. I wish the museum of archaeology in Sousse, Tunisia had a website with its collection online, but it doesn't. There are almost 100 photos from that museum available from Getty, but just about every one is of the extremely famous Roman mosaics (very much worth looking at, by the way -- they're amazing).

However, regardless of whether I can find other examples, I have no doubt whatsoever about the bust's authenticity, given how reputable the dealer is, given the lengthy and extremely specific provenance (it's quite rare to find an artifact on the market with a provenance dating back more than 100 years to a particular town, in North Africa or elsewhere -- Dumas' descendants waited a very long time to sell his collection of Roman and Carthaginian antiquities), and given everything about its appearance being completely consistent with an ancient terracotta molded figure. It's also much more finely rendered than some of the crude, supposedly ancient, pottery figures one sees for sale on Ebay, etc. Whoever sculpted the original clay model from which the molds were made was quite talented, I think! I do wonder what the sculptor used for a model, though, given how closely the hairstyle follows the details of one of Faustina II's hairstyles, even in back where one wouldn't necessarily see it on a coin. Although I suppose it would have been possible to extrapolate from a profile view.

Also, although terracotta heads and figurines are usually associated less with the Romans than with the Etruscans and with the Hellenistic Greek world (not only in Boeotia, where Tanagra is located, but all around the Mediterranean), I do know that terracotta was still widely used in Roman Egypt and elsewhere in Roman North Africa, up through the first few centuries AD. After all, most of the Roman terracotta/pottery oil lamps one sees come from North Africa. And it's not at all difficult to find small terracotta figurines manufactured in Roman Egypt during the first few centuries AD. See these three examples currently available from Ostracon Ancient Art, all with a provenance dating back to their publication in 1921: https://www.trocadero.com/stores/Os...-Slave-Boy-Published-1921-2nd-1st-Century-BC; https://www.trocadero.com/stores/Os...ole-Athena-Published-1921-1st-2nd-Century-AD; and https://www.trocadero.com/stores/Os...ian-Boys-Little-Dog-Published-1921-200-225-AD.

I'm thinking of posting a link to this thread in the ancient artifacts group at io, to ask if any of the experts there know of any similar terracotta portrait busts of Roman emperors or empresses, or even just ladies with hairstyles imitating the empress. Such a bust would certainly have been useful to every hairdresser in the provinces!

Finally, I'm very glad that this portrait bust does exist in terracotta: it wasn't cheap, but anything similar in bronze or marble would have cost at least 10x or 20x what I paid -- in other words, far beyond my means!

 

Does Beckmann have written descriptions of the characteristics of Types 7 and 8 that you might be able to post, or is it all done via photos? Thanks!

 

A wonderful bust, Donna. The hair style does suggest 2nd century AD, very much in the style of the the Antonine Dynasty. As for empress? Faustina II? I really lack any expertise to attribute the bust to this empress.

Often, attribution to a particular ruler for an antiquity can be made based on the location of discovery and any associated objects found with the object.

 

Wow Donna! Whoever she is that is just a fabulous piece! The history you can literally feel by just touching such a thing must be amazing. For what it's worth, my opinion is it is the spitting image of Faustina II. I hope you enjoy it for many years.

 

Thanks for the reply. These terracotta busts or statuettes are very interesting because they were cheap artefacts made in huge quantities, easily affordable for ordinary people who were 90% of the empire's population but who are rarely documented by texts. The ancient authors always focused on the elites. What did they do with these artefacts? I have several of them, all fragments, representing Serapis, Ephesian Artemis, the face of a lady with elaborate coiffure and holes in the ears (to fix metal earrings, probably), and a smiling warrior with crested helmet, shield and a hole in his fist to insert some mini weapon. The crude statuettes of gods and goddesses were obviously pious objects to be put in modest domestic shrines, like today similar cheap statuettes of the Madonna or Jesus on the cross. The rich could have them in bronze, the poor in terracotta. I think the lady and the warrior must have been toys for children, the lady an equivalent of our Barbie™ dolls (you could adorn her with jewels), the warrior like our Action Joe or Playmobil...
This is why I wonder what could have been the purpose of a cheap clay bust of an emperor or empress... In Turkey I have seen portraits or busts of Atatürk displayed in public places, administrations, shops, but never in homes. Same for Syria's Hafez (or Bachar) al-Assad: they are watching you in every shop of Damascus but I have never seen them in homes, where there are only icons, madonnas or images of the Kaaba (according to the family's religion). The image of the emperor is documented in noble materials only: marble, bronze, gold and silver, porphyry, and of course the coins. They could also be carefully painted on wooden panels, like icons (there is a famous icon of Septimius Severus' family, from Egypt, but there are not many parallels).
Of course one may think your bust represents not an empress but some lady with the same hairstyle, but it is an artefact fabricated in numbers, certainly not for a single family. IMO this is why the hypothesis of an empress makes sense. Maybe when Faustina was divinized there was a popular movement of piety for her, and cheap terracotta busts of her joined other gods' statuettes in some families' home shrines? I don't know what to think...