Since the paragraph beside the picture at the
head of this
thread does not say what material the
portrait based on a plaster
cast of the wax death mask was carved, I have obsessively been trying to find a reproduction showing it. The problem is that it is seldom shown in books on Late
Republican portraiture. I know it because it appeared later in Latin books and Social Studies books than in art
history books, and I used to own some pretty old books, such as Eugenie Sellers Strong's "
Roman Art", whence I may remember it. It is not in any book on
Roman art, archaeology, or
history that I own. It may have been in the Plates to illustrate the first
CAH, but it could have been anywhere of that or earlier vintage. Fact is, from among the many
portraits of Caesar's generation (and it is that) based on wax death masks, to all appearances, this one is distinguished by its appeal to the morbid
side of Victorian (and other late 19th c.) sentiment: deformity and ugliness were felt to be more real. For the social and educational class that
Caesar and Pompey belonged to, unmodified reliance on the death mask, which certainly was traditional, though we don't know how pervasively, was no longer fashionable. A wealthy merchant would be likelier to desire what I call a LITERALIST
portrait (not quite the same thing as REALIST: realism was fashionable all over the Greco-Roman world in the 1st c. BCE, and it created the illusion of "honest homeliness" (not asking why homeliness
had to be more honest than comeliness).
I think that the
head we are considering was careved in marble, however.
First, here is the bronze funerary
portrait of L. Caecilius Iucundus, probably earlier than
Caesar (a little).
Second, here is one of an anonymous young
man, probably
contemporary with
Caesar.
Third, here is a family group of L. Vibius' family, quite emphatically literalistic and unaffected by the knowledge that the elite, such as
Caesar,
had of Late Hellensitic styles and techniques; it may be as late as early Augustan, but unlike
Augustus this family did not hire Athenian carvers or seek to look like Classical prototypes.
All three of these probably referred to death masks, the bronzes perhaps most directly. Needless to say, for the hair and a couple of linear wrinkles they are "toolies", and of course their eyes were made to be open.
Pat L.
