Portrait of Agrippa
This portrait of Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa comes from Palazzo Borghese in Campo Marzio, where it was held together with 15 other busts that made up the series. It has been displayed in Room 4 of Villa Pinciana since at least 1832. The head in red porphyry is mounted on an oriental alabaster bust.
The Roman general was Augustus’s right-hand man. His representation here for the most part reproduces the known features of his physiognomy, within the limits faced by the sculptor to give shape to the porphyry, a material characterised by its particular hardness.
Object details
Inventory
Location
Date
Classification
Period
Medium
porphyry and oriental alabaster
Dimensions
Provenance
Included in decoration of the Gallery of Palazzo Borghese in Campo Marzio between 1674 and 1676 (H. Hibbard, ‘Palazzo Borghese Studies. II, the Galleria’, The Burlington Magazine, 104 (1962), p. 11 no. 12); Inventario Fidecommissario Borghese, 1833, C, p. 49, no. 111; purchased by Italian state, 1902.
Conservation and Diagnostic
- 1995/1996 C.B.C. Coop. a.r.l.
Commentary
Turned slightly to the left, Agrippa’s face shows conspicuously arched eyebrows, a forehead grooved with wrinkles and well-defined lips below a pronounced philtrum. A dimple is clearly visible in his protruding chin. He wears a paludamentum, fastened on his right shoulder with a round fibula and draped in flattened folds; the garment is similar to those portrayed in some of the other busts of the series ascribed to Giovanni Battista della Porta (inv. no. LIII). Part of Agrippa’s breastplate, shaped like a lion’s head, covers his right shoulder.
The facial features are the typical ones of the iconography of Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, known through numerous ancient busts. In these, the paludamentum – the mantle worn by Roman generals when they commanded the army – was an essential attribute in this case, given that the subject led the troops in the conquest of Egypt in 30 BC. While on the one hand his physiognomy here seems to derive directly from a Roman precedent – namely the bust which Pope Pius IV gave to Lorenzo de’ Medici in 1471 (Uffizi Gallery, Florence) – on the other his hair shows differences compared to ancient images of Agrippa: in this case he is not depicted with the usual locks of hair over the forehead but rather as bald.
The work is displayed in Room 4 of Galleria Borghese together with 15 busts in porphyry and alabaster from the family’s palazzo in Campo Marzio. Here they were once located in the gallery, framed by a plaster decoration made by Cosimo Fancelli between 1674 and 1676. According to documents from the Borghese Archive, the series was composed of the ‘Twelve Caesars’, with the addition of Nerva and Trajan as well as second versions of Vitellius and Titus (Vatican Secret Archive, AB, b. 5688, no. 15, published in Hibbard 1962, appendix, doc. I, pp. 19-20). In 1830 Nibby saw the series when it was still in Campo Marzio, describing the works as ‘16 busts with heads in porphyry, representing the 12 Caesars and 4 consuls’. Two years later, when they had been moved to Villa Pinciana and displayed along the wall of Room 4, he listed them as Trajan, Galba, Claudius, Otho, Vespasian (two exemplars) Scipio Africanus, Agrippa, Augustus, Vitellius (two exemplars), Titus, Nero, Cicero, Domitian, Vespasian, Caligula and Tiberius; this catalogue was confirmed by the 1833 Inventario Fidecommissario.
Yet if this description (which includes a second Vespasian, executed by Tommaso Fedeli in 1619 and transferred from the Gladiator Room) corresponds to the current state of the series, we are left with several uncertainties: to begin with, we must ask what happened to the busts of Caesar, Titus and Nerva, which were present in 1674-76 but do not form part of the series today; secondly, we must wonder who the fourth consul referred to by Nibby in 1830 could be, given that currently only three are represented (Agrippa, Cicero and Scipio Africanus); and finally, we must inquire where the busts of the consuls came from. It is therefore possible that the sculptures displayed in the gallery, which were already present in Palazzo Borghese, did not correspond to those envisioned for the iconographic programme of the vault: this discrepancy may indeed account for the errors of identification in our sources. In that case, as Hibbard suggested, the bust of Agrippa may have been used in place of that of Julius Caesar (1962, p. 11 no. 12). The theory of possible substitutions is supported by the common date of execution of the busts, which critics believe were all sculpted in the same period during the 17th century (Faldi 1954, pp. 16-17; Della Pergola, 1974; Moreno, C. Stefani, 2000, p. 129; Del Bufalo 2018, p. 116).
Sonja Felici
Bibliography
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