Unknown
Roman

Portrait Head of a Bearded Man (R), 3rd c. CE, mid
bronze
11 1/2 x 8 1/2 x 8 1/2 in.

SBMA, Gift of Wright Ludington
1971.51.2

RESEARCH PAPER

This bronze Portrait Head of a Bearded Man from the third century C.E. found in western Asia Minor looks like a real person. His face seems to capture the personal stress of a Roman leader living in the eastern provinces during a troubled time in the history of the Roman Empire. This portrait also exemplifies the quality of Roman bronze casting techniques from 1800 years ago a technique still used today.

The Bearded Man looks weary, middle-aged with a well-managed beard and mustache. His hair radiates from the back of the head in the Roman fashion of a specific time. The textured wavy hair frames his smooth face to focus the viewer on the eyes. His heavy-set brow gives seriousness to his stare; the hair is stylized while the face portrays a specific individual. Hairstyles traveled through the Roman Empire with portraits of the Emperor and other public figures and can help art historians date unknown Roman portraits like this one. The way this hair is shown reflects the style of an earlier period, brought back into fashion during the reign of the emperor Gallienus (reign: 253-268 CE). The subtle lines are drawn around the pupils and the incised iris give life to the eyes. While the heavy eyelids make the eyes seem tired; his mouth is set firm but about to speak. This man seems disillusioned as his eyes look down and away from his audience. He is an individual powerful enough to have a life-sized bronze statue of him installed in a public place.

The torn bronze edges of the neck indicate that the head was probably separated from a full-body statue. Such standing bronze portrait statues were popular among local politicians during the late Imperial period 230-284 CE. The head may have been torn off to melt the bronze body into weapons at a later time. 

The Romans invented portraiture as we know it from several regional traditions.  The Italian region was controlled by the Etruscan culture before they became Romans. The Etruscans had a tradition of creating “death masks” made in beeswax of the actual dead person’s face right after death and reproduced them for mourners to carry in funeral processions. These fragile wax masks recorded every wrinkle, mole, and crooked nose and were kept in the ancestral home but rarely survived. Later Romans had “death masks” made while they were still alive for artists to use to make more permanent portraits of public figures, patrons, ordinary citizens, women, and even children. The amount of realism like a crooked nose versus the romanticized image of a “godly” emperor changed with the tastes of the times and these variations in style can help archaeologists date a work of art.

The second tradition to evolve into portraiture was the Romans’ love of everything Greek. Greek slaves were the tutors of wealthy Romans; sculptors practiced their skills by making marble copies of Greek sculptures. Many Romans collected art and collected copies of Greek sculptures. So Roman artists were well trained and had ample patrons. What distinguished the Greek sculpture was the idealized human body to reflect the beauty of the human spirit and human godly potential. For the Romans, an individual’s leadership, civic power, physical strength, and unique raw features were valued over abstract idealized beauty.

Art was pervasive in Roman society; as a huge multicultural empire, Romans were exposed to objects from all over the known world; love of art encouraged knowledge and appreciation of art in everyday objects, sculptures large and small, portraits, paintings, and murals. This enjoyment of art was one of the great lasting contributions of the Roman Empire.

This portrait head reportedly came from western Asia Minor now Turkey in the mid 3rd century CE. We do not know this man’s name or exact dates. He may have been an Imperial Governor whose primary job was to collect taxes for faraway Rome or one of the 20 “Soldier Emperors” between 235-284 CE. The face captures the strain of leading during these very difficult times.

The “Crisis of the Third Century” (or the Imperial Crisis) began with the assassination of Emperor Alexander Severus by his own soldiers in 235 C.E. The Senate in Rome was corrupt and losing power. As the Empire grew the mercenary army doubled in size and demanded double their pay. With inflation, the coins contained less and less valuable metals. The economy was in crisis from paying for the huge army and having a third of its population enslaved as the spoils of war and who were excluded from the economy; the lower-class freemen had no incentive or opportunity to work; a pandemic spread across the empire and barbarians threatened every border. The Roman Empire divided into three parts briefly until Diocletian in 284 CE reunited the empire. Thirty years later Christianity replaced the state religion and the capital moved from Rome to Constantinople in the Eastern half of the Roman empire. This portrait was found in western Turkey near Constantinople and purchased in the 1920s by Wright S. Ludington.

The significance of this bronze Roman Portrait Head of a Bearded Man is that it embodies the evolution from the idealized Greek sculpture to the Roman realistic portraits. The power of Roman portraiture in this face seems to capture the grim reality that the Roman empire was losing its power at this time. Seeing a surviving Roman bronze head from 1800 years ago of such extraordinary quality and detail is a privilege made possible by the donation of Wright S. Ludington who helped found the SBMA in 1941 and continued his stewardship of the museum for 50yrs. During that time, he gave almost 500 works of art to the museum and helped make SBMA one of the outstanding collections in the US.

Prepared for the Santa Barbara Museum of Art Docent Council by Pattie Firestone, 2020

BIBLIOGRAPHY

https://www.metmuseum.org/art/metpublications/Roman_Portraits_Sculptures_in_Stone_and_Bronze
https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/grbr/hd_grbr.htm
https://www.ancient.eu/Crisis_of_the_Third_Century/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTqmIFEx72E
What Caused the Fall of the Western Roman Empire?'
https://member.ancient.eu/Roman_Art/
https://member.ancient.eu/Julia_Domna/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asia_(Roman_province)
https://play.hbomax.com/series/urn:hbo:series:Rome

POSTSCRIPT

Bronze Casting

This unknown Roman artist was well trained in the art of bronze casting. The technique of casting large bronze figures was passed down from the ancient Greeks in the third millennium BC to the Romans and the same technique is used today. The ancients learned through trial and error that mixing copper with tin created a metal with a lower melting point, better strength, and created a more detailed casting than pure copper; and the bronze medal lasted for thousands of years as seen in our Bronze Portrait Head of a Bearded Man from 3rd century C.E. 

Copper was found in several places around the Mediterranean; in fact, the name of the island of Cyprus derives from the Greek word for copper. Tin was imported from Turkey, Afghanistan, and Cornwall, England; both copper and tin were so necessary for weapons and art they became a motivation to include these geographic areas in any empire. 

The large-scale Greek and Roman bronze statues were made using the indirect method of lost-wax casting. First, a clay model was made exactly as the artist and patron wanted it. Then the artist covered the clay model with plaster or more clay to create a mold to copy the exact full-sized figure. The mold was made in several sections if the piece was really large. When the plaster or clay mold was dry, the foundry separated the original piece from the mold. The artisans reassembled the empty mold to make an exact empty space of the original sculpture. 

Liquid Beeswax is then poured into the mold just enough to create a thin layer of wax on all the sides and in every crevice of the mold. When the wax dries, the outside plaster or clay mold is then removed revealing an exact thin wax copy of the original. This is when the artist can make any adjustments to the wax copy.
 
The foundry then adds a system of wax funnels, channels, and vents to the outside of the thin wax copy. The foundry then covers the entire wax structure with layers of clay to create a new mold around the outside and the inside of the thin copy. That mold dries and is heated so that the wax pours out through the funnel. 

This new mold holds the thin empty outline of the sculpture and its system of a funnel, channels, and vents. The craftsmen heat it again to fire the clay mold and melt out any remaining wax. The mold is heated a third time when the molten liquid bronze is poured into the funnel shape connected to the thin empty space and to the vents which allow air to escape as the molten bronze fills the exact empty space of the thin outer layer of the original piece. 

When the metal cools the plaster or clay mold is broken off to reveal the hard cast bronze copy of the original sculpture. The funnel, channels, and vents are cut off. If several pieces have been poured separately, they are joined together; then using abrasives the bronze is cleaned and polished. 

The smooth joining together of the larger pieces is one of the greatest technical achievements of the Greek and Roman bronze casting techniques. The greenish color we see on most bronze pieces is the natural oxidation overtime of the bronze (copper) interacting with oxygen in the air (like copper gutters), also known as verdigris, or vert-de-Grèce ("green of Greece") or vert-de-gris ("green of grey")

Bronze casting is very labor-intensive and requires many experienced and well-trained craftsmen: artists specializing in portraiture; artists of armor or bodies; mold makers; funnel, channel, and vent makers; and finishing experts polishing, adding incised surface lines and other craftsmen creating different colored surface patinas on the metal or painting the surface. A wealthy merchant might have a painted portrait of an ancestor on wood but only the wealthy and political elite had bronze full-length statues made.

Prepared for the Santa Barbara Museum of Art Docent Council by Pattie Firestone, 2020

This sculpture previously was titled "Bearded Bronze Head (Roman portrait probably Gallienic period)"

COMMENTS

This life-size bronze head, reportedly from western Asia Minor, serves as a splendid example of the standing portrait statues that were popular in Roman times, especially in the late Imperial period. The serrated lower edge of the neck probably indicates that the head was originally joined to a full-length figure that perhaps stood on a pedestal in a public place.

The Santa Barbara Bearded Head is that of a middle-aged man; his hair is cut close and low on the forehead in the Roman style, and he has a short, rather unruly beard and joining mustache. His expression is somewhat grim—tightly closed lips, with a downward turn, intensely staring eyes—and he looks to be a strong-willed, perhaps stubborn, Roman magistrate. The hair is rendered in long, clearly defined strands that sweep forward from the back of the head and almost fully conceal the brow. The ears are modeled in a surprisingly cursory fashion and the eyebrows, too are only lightly indicated with a series of short, carefully incised diagonal lines at the very edge of the sharp browline. All the emphasis is on the eyes themselves, deeply set and carefully modeled. An inverted lunette and short vertical highlight ridge are used to indicate the pupils, and a semicircular incision defines each iris. Both pupil and iris are partly obscured by the upper eyelids however.

Although the somewhat classical appearance of this head, particularly implied in the hair and beard, calls to mind Roman sculpture of the period of Hadrian (117-138 CE), which was strongly influenced by classical Greek art, it is more likely that the head dates from the following century, perhaps from the reign of the emperor Gallienus (253-268 CE), who was like Hadrian, an ardent philhellene. The rendering of the eyes conforms to portrait heads of the Severan and post-Severan periods, and the wide cheekbones are markedly consistent with those found in Gallienic period portrait heads.

- Mario A. Del Chiaro, Classical Art Sculpture, SBMA catalog, 1984

SBMA CURATORIAL LABELS

The broken edge of the neck of this portrait indicates that it probably once belonged to a
full-size statue. Relatively few bronze statues have survived from antiquity since the material
could be melted and repurposed. It likely represented a Roman official from the eastern Roman
Empire, perhaps erected in a public space to signify his politically powerful status in the region.
The way his hair is shown reflects the style of an earlier period, brought back into fashion during
the reign of the emperor Gallienus (reign: 253-268 CE).

- Thayer Reopening, 2021