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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Ardatirion, post: 934269, member: 9204&quot;]I unfortunately haven&#039;t handled very many yet. Certainly on the earlier ones. But from what I&#039;ve seen/read tt starts to get fuzzy around Rheskoporis IV and Severus Alexander. I think this portrait still bears a resemblance to more standard images of Gallienus, but beyond his reign, it becomes completely stylized.</p><p><br /></p><p>Its intriguing to wonder why. I refuse to accept the old thesis that &quot;degenerate styles&quot; arose during the 4th century. Rather, I think of it more like modern, abstract art. The accuracy of the Bosporan portraiture drops off even earlier than it does at the central mints; portraits of Philip I on staters are for the most part unrecognizable. Bosporan portraits also don&#039;t seem to adopt the same tropes as Rome and doesn&#039;t really emphasize strength or solidarity in the images. Now, if it were only the Imperial portraits that changed on these coins, I would suspect that the central government had simply stopped bothering to send new portraits. That wouldn&#039;t be terribly surprising, what with the revolving door that the throne practically was at the time. But the royal Bosporan portraits also exhibit the same stylistic changes. So I suspect that the new styles are imports, influences from the Scythian culture that had always existed in the region and only now seeped into numismatic art.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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