AUGUSTAN PERIOD, CIRCA LATE 1ST CENTURY B.C.

Livia Drusilla was born in 58 B.C., the daughter of Marcus Livius Claudianus of the patrician gens Claudia and his wife Afidia. In either 43 or 42 B.C. she married Tiberius Claudius Nero, with whom she had two sons. She met Octavian, the future Emperor Augustus, in 38 B.C., while pregnant with her second child. Octavian was also married at the time to Scribonia, whom he divorced so that he could marry Livia. Her first son Tiberius would later be Augustus’s successor, while her second son Drusus was born after her marriage to Augustus. Despite the hint of scandal to begin their lives together, Livia and Augustus were dedicated to each another throughout their 51 years of marriage.

Augustus and Livia carefully cultivated their images. Those devised for her, according to Bartman (Portraits of Livia, Imaging the Imperial Woman in Augustan Rome, p. 72) “promoted her various personae: traditional mother and virtuous wife, dynastic matriarch, and highest ranking woman in Rome.” To achieve this, her portraits display “an ageless and elegant beauty,” and a “calm and dignified demeanor” (op. cit., p. 74). For portraits made during her lifetime, she is shown wearing a distinctive coiffure characterized by a roll of hair above the forehead, known as a nodus. This hairstyle was popularized by Livia, and emulated by all strata of society, from women of the court, to the aristocracy, and even to freedwomen.

Of her lifetime portraits, four main types have been identified, each named after the present location of the finest surviving examples. The Faiyum (also known as the Copenhagen type 615) and Marbury Hall types are most closely related to the present example but differ chiefly in the form of the nodus, which, on the Marbury Hall type, is flat, tapering into a braid over the crown of the head and then wrapped into a chignon, while the nodus of the Faiyum type is taller and heavier (p. 76 in Kleiner, Roman Sculpture).

According to Bartman (op. cit. pp. 74-75), the Faiyum type “should be seen as the female counterpart to the Prima Porta type, created circa 27 B.C. for Augustus. Both share crisply defined features, a regular but not quite symmetrical hair arrangement, and restrained facial modelling. Like the Prima Porta typology, Livia’s Faiyum type conveyed an image that was physiognomically distinct yet classicizing…” Further, “…the Faiyum introduced a new element of generalism into the early portrait by flattening the facial planes, enlarging the eyes, shrinking the mouth and reducing the detailing of the hair that frames the face. Neither harshly veristic nor fully ideal, the Faiyum type placed Livia between the realm of the ordinary republican matron and the immortal goddess.”

Closest in style to the head presented here is an example now in The Walters Art Museum (see Bartman, op. cit., figs. 13-14, cat. no. 75), which the author also sees as a hybrid of the Marbury Hall and Faiyum types. On the present example the chignon is absent but would have been finished in marble dust stucco. The surface of the marble at the back was intentionally roughened in order for the stucco to adhere. As the portrait would have been painted, the difference between carved marble and stucco adjuncts would have been invisible. The use of stucco was common for sculptures produced in Egypt, which had no marble quarries.