We have run into one of the oldest and most pernicious misapplications of the word 'subjective' and a few other mistakes. First, Lars is right. This is just a confirming addendum.
Style is difficult to talk about not because it is illusory (though the inexperienced can fool themselves with it) but because humanity has not developed verbal language to
handle it. It is objective traits of the thing in question that well trained and experienced persons may summarize as 'lifeless' (or as the case may be). Similar terms are used for less than great poetry or essays, which are not quite so difficult to encapsulate verbally, being themselves verbal. The
style of a performance of, say, a Beethoven quartet, once beyond the technical points, is similarly difficult. Like the visual, the auditory is not very susceptible to verbal discussion. Yet the effect of a great quartet ensemble playing for an audience that is congenial is a great deal more, and other, than 'how they feel about it'. In the visual realm, it is characteristics of the object that have their effect in subjects. In these subjects, what KjetilK called 'subjective' is rightly called 'personal'. It is true that no two persons have exactly the same feelings about things--or, if they have, it is very difficult to express verbally the personal response to a visual object. The point is,
Curtis and Barry, since they were just named, might have their own personal aesthetic responses to a given object, but also agree as to whether it is ancient
style, or not, or, for example, whether it is typical or not.
Also, KjetilK spoke of '3rd century style'! WHICH 3rd century
style? Which decade, which reign, even which
mint? There is no such thing as 3rd-century
style. There are, however, very definite traits and preferences in the coinage for
Gordian III (even for all the Gordiani), particularly for the
Rome mint.
Finally,
Gordian III's facial and cranial bone structure was distinctive, and the engravers were well practiced in it; they understood it very well. There is a range of eye forms in Gordian's
Rome coinage, but it is quite uncommonly narrow.
'Dead' and 'lifeless' are risky epithets (just as 'vibrant'--ugh--is), but none of them are 'descriptions' at all. They are summary epithets conventionaly used to summarize and evoke: to encourage you to look again.
By the way, one reason the
head of
Gordian on this
antoninianus looks 'lifeless' is that features are more or less 'rubber-stamped' onto a stock
head and do not relate to one another as in living anatomy.
Patricia Lawrence