American Academy in Rome - Role Models Abstract

Eve D'Ambra

The article examines the representation of girls or young women as the goddess Diana in the form of a mythological portrait, that is, a head with individualized features and a body reproducing well-known sculptural types of the divine huntress. The corpus consists of a group of portrait busts, statues, and reliefs, dating from the late first through the early third centuries C.E. and produced mostly in Rome with a few provincial examples. Many of these are funerary commemorations; those with extant inscriptions indicate that parents (some of them freedmen and -women) have dedicated altars or statues in the memory of the daughters that they have lost. The scholarship on the mythological portrait has compartmentalized the sculptures into idealized bodies and realistic heads that lack any coherence; I propose to consider the complementary nature of heads and bodies, and the sculpture's role in the conventions of commemoration: Diana is not only appropriate because of her status as maiden but her role as huntress has significance for mourning fathers, in particular. After an analysis of the portrait types, the paper turns to rites of passage, the cult of Diana at Nemi, and literary accounts of mourning daughters (the topos of the death of the maiden). The hunting goddess was chosen as a mythological model not because she protects women but because she offers a heroic and noble image of virtus that appealed to the parents of daughters who died before marriage and motherhood.

Department of Art, Vassar College, 124 Raymond Avenue, Poughkeepsie, NY 12604-0249.

Evdambra@vassar.edu