With age comes experience, and sculptors in the Roman Republic highlighted seniority—warts and all.
Veristic male portrait (similar to Head of a Roman Patrician), early 1st Century B.C.E., marble, life size (Vatican Museums, Rome)
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Dr. Steven Zucker: [0:04] Before the emperor ruled Rome, Rome was ruled by a republic, by a senate.
Dr. Beth Harris: [0:10] A kind of council of elders.
Dr. Zucker: [0:12] These generally were older men who had come from the elite families in Rome. And so when we think of the people accorded the most privilege, the most power in the Roman Republic, these were older men. Their age, their experience, is what counted.
Dr. Harris: [0:27] And so we find, during this period of the Republic especially, the period of the late Republic, sculptures where the sculptor seems to have taken every pain to record a real sense of age and experience.
Dr. Zucker: [0:40] One example of a veristic portrait is in the Vatican, from the very late Republican period. This is just before Julius Caesar will begin the process of turning the Republic into an empire. We refer to these as veristic portraits.
Dr. Harris: [0:55] It comes from the Latin word “verus” for truth, and so there’s this idea that they’re very truthful, but maybe there’s an exaggeration of that sense of experience and wisdom and age.
Dr. Zucker: [1:06] We see a head of a man that probably came from a much larger sculpture ultimately. We see his head is covered with a toga, which suggests that he was involved in some sort of ritual. Concern is expressed through the eyes. Look at the way that the lips, which are quite thin, are pressed together.
[1:22] There is a solemnity. There is a seriousness. There is a kind of authority that is born of the qualities of the face that we’re seeing.
Dr. Harris: [1:30] As we look at this shelf with six or eight busts along it, this face stands out. It’s really different from the tradition that will develop during the empire. Augustus becomes the first emperor of Rome and establishes a tradition that looks back to ancient Greece and the tendency that we see there to idealize the human face and the human body.
[1:53] This veristic portrait will come to represent, later on, noble Republican ideals. What’s interesting is that we see in the later images of emperors that they choose to some degree more or less to idealize themselves, so that if they have themselves portrayed more realistically, they’re recalling the virtues of the ancient Roman Republic.
[2:17] If they idealize themselves more, they’re recalling ancient Greek tradition.
Dr. Zucker: [2:21] In other words, this was a very conscious set of attributes. It was a very conscious set of symbols that you could draw on more or less.
Dr. Harris: [2:29] It was a visual language.
Dr. Zucker: [2:30] It’s so interesting. If you think about the way that we represent ourselves now — if you open up a magazine, you have young models that are ideal, that are perfect, and the older are not given primary status in our visual culture, but the ancient Romans, at least for a moment, felt differently.
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