Portrait Statue of a Young Girl

Roman art

This statue portrays a young girl wearing a sleeved chiton, which extends to her feet, and a peplos that is fastened at her shoulders and cinched with a bow beneath her chest. Her face is full and childlike, with elongated eyes and a small, full mouth with a hint of a smile. She has thick hair that falls in comma-like ringlets and surrounds her face with a frame of individual curls. This work, which has been the subject of exhaustive study, is considered a replica and scholars date it variously to between the Neronian and Antonine periods, based on models from the fourth century BCE.

Identified by De Rossi in 1821 as a portrait of Agrippina the Younger, the young bride of Domitius Ahenobarbus, it was reported in the fourth room of the Palazzina Borghese 1832 and in the sixth room in 1893.

The distinctive hair, with its carefully defined curls, and the facial features suggest a date for the sculpture of around the first century CE.

Object details

Commentary

This sculpture portrays a young girl standing with her right leg slightly bent and to the side. She is wearing a sleeved chiton and a peplos, which is knotted below her chest with a thin lace, tied in a bow. Her garment, which is fastened over the shoulders, has a long apoptygma, fold of fabric that drapes over her hips and its gently held up with her left hand. The elegant drapery of the sleeves is fastened with a row of small buttons. On the lower part of the body, the garment is rendered in deep parallel folds that shift to the right to accommodate the slightly advanced right leg. Her head is slightly turned to the left and she has a thick head of short, disorderly ringlets that crown the forehead with comma-shaped locks oriented toward the right. Her full face has chubby cheeks and generous lips. Wide brows frame her elongated eyes, which have swollen eyelids.

In one of the first descriptions of the work, Rossi identified it in 1821 as Agrippina the Younger, the young bride of Domitius Ahenobarbus. The scholar attributed the absence of decoration worthy of an Augusta to her marriage to a ‘private citizen’ and noted the good quality of the statue, although he did not consider it the ‘height of beauty’ (1821, p. 106, pl. 46). In 1832, Nibby mentioned it in the fourth room and dated it to the age of Septimius Severus, while Venturi, in 1893, reported it in its current location, the sixth room, and identified it as an empress dating to the Antonine period (1832, pp. 114–115; 1893, p. 42). Only one scholar, Platner, has argued that the head is not original (1838, p. 252, no. 11). Helbig considers the sculpture to be a funerary copy of a fourth-century Greek original and, based on the chubby face and extremely carefully defined curls, dated it to the Flavian period (1913, p. 246, no. 1554). Lippold shared this thinking, identifying the head as a portrait of a little girl contemporary to the Ludovisi group by the Greek sculptor Menelaus, who was active between the first century BCE and the first century CE (1825, p. 15, nos 2757–2759). This comparison was also supported by von Steuben, Borda, who linked the face of Electra in the Ludovisi group to Julio-Claudian portraiture, and Calza, who dated the work to the Neronian period (1966, p. 738, no. 1984; 1953, p. 114, figs. 30, 31, 39; 1957 p. 14, nos 127–129). In 1991, Amedick linked the hairstyle to that of Claudia Octavia, Nero’s first wife (p. 387, pl. 101, 3).

Finally, the handling of the drapery seems to draw on models from the fifth and sixth centuries BCE, of which the Borghese seems to be a copy, datable to the first century CE.

Giulia Ciccarello