• Monday 17 March - Panel IV

The Origins of Roman 'Veristic' Portraiture:
New Evidence from the Excavations at Kedesh (Israel)

C. Brian Rose

One of the most distinctive signs of the Roman aristocrat during the Republican period is the "veristic" or aged portrait, usually characterized by a receding hairline and a profusion of lines around the eyes, mouth, and forehead. The type is well represented in European museums but rarely found in sealed archaeological contexts, and the date of the type's origin has always been uncertain. The earliest veristic portraits in Italy, both sculptural and numismatic, date to the middle of the first century B.C., although they have also been found in the Agora of the Italians on Delos, which provides a terminus ante quem of 88 B.C. for the type. Scholars have often assumed that this portrait type was developed in the second century B.C., but there was no secure evidence to prove it, and the political and social conditions that prompted the creation of the type could never be defined or explored.

The new excavations at Kedesh in the northern Galilee have recently shed considerable light on the problem. Roman portraits of veristic type have been found on a hoard of bullae (clay sealings) from a Phoenician administrative center, and they can be firmly dated to the second half of the second century B.C. These discoveries suggest that the type originated around 200 B.C.
There are no Etruscan or Italic precedents for this kind of aristocratic presentation, and the type appears to have been adapted from portraits of Greek philosophers, which began to appear in greater numbers at this time in the public spaces of Rome and in the peristyle courts of country villas. The himations, enthroned poses, and longish beards that had been common in philosopher portraits were removed, but the marks of age remained. This was also a time when foreign conquests prompted the arrival of a large amount of war booty in central Rome, and prominent in this group were statues of Greek generals and their soldiers. During the same period literary sources indicate that there was a dramatic increase in portraits of Roman commanders, many of which occupied the same spaces as the war booty, and the new veristic type seems to have been created in part to distinguish one from the other.

The problem still remains as to why such veristic portraits appear in Rome only in the mid first century B.C., and only in marble. During the second century B.C., honorific inscriptions indicate that marble was considerable more prestigious and valuable than bronze, and at that time Romans seem to have favored the former for images of their gods and the latter for statues of men. The change to marble portraits coincides almost exactly with the early exploitation of the marble quarries at Luna, in northwestern Italy. This made marble a more inexpensive medium in which to work, and it seems to have had a major impact on aristocratic portraiture in the late Republic

Department of Classics, University of Cincinnati, 410 Carl Blegen Library, Cincinnati, Ohio 45221-0226.

Brian.rose@uc.edu