Portrait of Scipio Africanus
This bust portrays Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus with his characteristic bald head, full oval-shaped face, straight nose and deep nasolabial folds. Although no ancient prototype that represented the Roman general and consul shows these traits, they are associated with him by a long interpretative tradition.
The opera was brought to Villa Pinciana between 1830 and 1832. Previously it had been held in Palazzo Borghese in Campo Marzio, forming part of a series of 16 porphyry and alabaster busts of eminent men in the vault of the Gallery of Mirrors. The sculptor of the series is unknown. On the basis of stylistic characteristics, scholars date the busts to the 17th century.
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
The bust portrays a bald man with his head turned slightly to the left. The openness of his gaze is emphasised by protruding arched eyebrows. The sides of his straight nose and lips show deep furrows. His mouth is well defined and his oval-shaped face is full.
The subject of the portrait has been identified as Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus (236-183 BC), the Roman consul and talented military strategist. The identifying elements of the face – his baldness, deep nasolabial folds, and straight nose – do not, however, correspond to those of any ancient work depicting Scipio. Critics have rather located the prototype in the basalt sculpture by an anonymous artist in the Cesi collection (which later passed to the Ludovisi family and then to the Rospigliosi). The identification of this work with Africanus was based above all on the subject’s baldness: Scipio in fact introduced the fashion of shaving his head daily to Rome (Palma Venetucci 1993, pp. 53-4). His inclusion in the series of ‘eminent men’ dates to the Renaissance, when Scipio began to be regarded as a model to be emulated on the moral and political levels, in contrast to Caesar, who rather took on the reputation of a tyrant (Tonini 2004-2005, p. 15).
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 Scipio Africanus may have been used in place of that of Nerva (1962, p. 11 n. 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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