Masks of Honor： Ancient Roman Male Portraiture in Context

Good evening, everyone. I'm Jennifer Kastler-Price. I'm a Senior Curator for Asian, African, and Ancient American Art here at the Kimbell Art Museum, and I'm also the in-house curator for Myth and Marble Ancient Roman Sculpture from the Torlonia Collection, which I hope many of you have already seen. And if you haven't, please do be sure to go see it. It will be on view until January 25th of 2026, which is just around the corner. Hard to believe, but it's really kind of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see an amazing, amazing private collection of Ancient Roman Sculpture that has not been on view to the public since World War II. And even then, the public was select. So, we're thrilled to be hosting the exhibition here at the Kimbell, and I want to thank you all for coming out on a chilly December evening, and I just want to take this opportunity to wish everyone a very happy holiday season, however you choose to celebrate. So, it's my pleasure to introduce our speaker tonight for our Friday night lecture series. P. Gregory Worden has served as the Mark A. Rogland Director of the Custard Institute for Spanish Art and Culture at the Meadows Museum at SMU since June of 2022. From 2012 to 2022, he was President of Franklin University in Switzerland, was awarded an honorary doctorate from the university in 2023, and is currently President Emeritus. Worden has taught at Bowdoin College, the University of Pennsylvania, and at SMU for 30 years, where he is now Professor of Art History Emeritus and Professor of Practice in Arts Administration. He is Executive Editor of the journal Etruscan and Italic Studies, President of the Etruscan Foundation, Consulting Scholar of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology, an international member of the Instituto di Studi Etruschi e Italici, hope I got that sort of close, my Italian's a little rusty, and an International Fellow of the Explorers Club. Worden has authored or co-authored seven books and over 100 articles and reviews. He has lectured widely internationally, including keynote lectures at the British Museum, the Getty Museum, the Florence Archaeological Museum, and numerous universities. He has organized museum exhibitions in both the U.S. and Europe, and served as Interim Director of the Meadows Museum from 2001 to 2003, where he curated the exhibit, Greek Face Painting, Form, Figure, and Narrative, Treasures of the National Archaeological Museum in Madrid. And in 2009, he also organized the Meadows Museum Exhibition, From the Temple and the Tomb, Etruscan Treasures from Tuscany, the largest exhibit on the Etruscans in North America. This was news to me. A native of Florence, Italy, Worden is the founder and co-director of the Mugello Valley Archaeological Project and Excavations at Poggio Colla, which have been featured in the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, the European Media, the Discovery Channel, and in the documentary Etruscan Odyssey Expanding Archaeology. In 2012, he was awarded the title of Cavalier in the order of the Star of Italy, Republic of Italy, for contributions to Italian culture. In his lecture tonight, Worden will explore the evolution of Roman male portraiture from the veristic or hyper-realistic style of the Republic to the idealized images of the Empire. Many of these examples you will see on view in this special exhibition. So please join me in welcoming P. Gregory Worden. Good evening. I guess the microphone is working. Yes. Yay. Okay. Good evening, everyone, and thank you for coming. It's my great pleasure to talk to you about this exhibit. As I will tell you, it's full of remarkable works of art and some even that I—well, actually, there are several—that I have used when teaching in the last 50 years or so that I had never seen until they came here to Fort Worth. So it really is just an exceptional exhibit, and it's going to be fun to talk about a couple of these pieces. What I want to do today is to go over these topics, to talk about the Torlonia old man or the man from Otricoli, whatever we want to call him, that wonderful sculpture that you see right here, and the whole question of verism, and then to connect that to Roman funerary customs and even Etruscan antecedents—the Etruscans, the precursors of the Romans in Italy and the people who actually controlled Rome in the early days—one brief note about men and women, and then a little bit about imperial portraiture, and then a topic that really is my research area, and that is the whole question of display. How would these sculptures have been seen? How would they have been understood? How would they have even been physically displayed in the ancient world? So those are the topics, and of course I want to begin with him because he is so great, and again I had never seen him. I've shown him in slides and in PowerPoints for years, and then he came to Fort Worth, and it's just so great to see an old friend that I'd never met. And in this slide here, in this image here, I've removed the bust, the later bust here. We can see him. We see the nose that has been added, and there, you know, a little bit of the ear and things like that, but we're really up close and personal with him, and he is the prototypical veristic portrait of the late Roman Republic of the first century BCE, the end of the first century BCE. And when we talk about verism, of course that's a word that gets used a lot, and it refers to, we have about a couple hundred portraits that we would call veristic in this kind of style. It's about realism and about hyper-realism here, and I always love the term hyper-realism because hyper-realism can't be realism, right? If you think about it, it's not realism when you're hyper-realistic, and that's a little bit of what I want to unpack at first here as we look at a few of these portraits. Now, I like audience participation. I'm not going to call on you, but I want you to do something for me. I want you to hold up your hand and cover the top part of his face, because then you really get to see the way the mouth is set, and I call this the veristic smile, which is not a smile at all as you can see, but it really is a feature that we will see over and over again as we look at the sculpture that's called veristic. The other thing you should do is, you've got to work here, right? Put up your hand and cover the lower part of the face and look at the eyes, and the eyes of course would have been painted or filled in somehow, but there's also the squint, the veristic squint here, the way those eyes are not, and those are the two things really that are the important part of the portrait. The rest of it is a kind of roadmap of his face, an older man, sunken cheeks, maybe he's lost some teeth, he's had a tough time physically, he's probably been in battle many, many times, but he's still got that squint that tells you he's really, he knows what's going on, and that's set to the mouth that tells you that you don't want to mess with this guy. This is someone who still at his advanced age is 100% there, and that's what this is about. This is what the image is here of a Roman patrician who has served his city, his country very, very well, and now is proud of every one of those flaws, every one of those little bits and nicks that he has in his face. When I talk about this to students, I always talk about this whole idea of physiognomy equals character, and that kind of goes against the grain for us, because we do believe, don't we, that you can't judge a book by its cover? Well, I don't actually. You can judge a book by its cover, many, many times, maybe not every time, and the same thing maybe with physiognomy, and there's a famous anecdote about Abraham Lincoln when he was putting his cabinet together, and he was famous because he really went across the aisle, and he found people from different perspectives, put them all together in his cabinet, and one man's name came up with his advisors, and he said, no, I will never have that man in my cabinet, and they asked him, why is that? He said, I don't like the look of his face, at which point people said, well, that seems a little shallow, doesn't it? He said, any man above the age of 40 deserves the face that he has, and what he was saying is that you kind of grow, you begin to look the way you are. I don't know if this applies to women. I'm not going to touch that topic at all. He said men, and I think it's true. You see some people and you know immediately, be careful. He is an old grump. There's no question about it. You can see that here. He's often identified as Cato, the biggest grump in all of Roman history, at Cato the Elder, and I wish he were, because for me, he is exactly what I would think Cato must have been like. But in any case, this whole idea of the importance of physiognomy, and let's look at him from the side for a minute, because it's not so easy to do that in the exhibition downstairs, and two different photographs where you can see how he changes even a little bit as the lighting changes, as the angle changes a bit, and my only complaint is I wish they'd done a better job with his nose. He needs a slightly better, bigger Roman. Romans believed in the nose, the importance of the nose. We all talk about the Roman nose. His nose is a little bit pushed in. He needs a nose job, I think, to be the kind of powerful individual that he wants to see here. So, heuristic portraits. Let's just look at a few of them here. There's many, many of them. Some are quite well-known. The one in the Getty Museum on the right. Others, not so much. There's a tiny little museum, the Museo Civico in Osimo, just outside of Ancona, has the one on the left, which is almost downright weird, where the flesh just seems to really sag there, and this is certainly exaggerated, non-realistic realism, hyper-realism that we're seeing here. In both of them, though, again, lots of things change. It's that squint and the set of the mouth. Again, that mouth that keeps appearing over and over again. In Rome, real men did not smile. That's pretty clear. Actually, no one seems to have smiled in ancient Rome, at least as you look at the actual art, but especially not these guys in the first century BCE at the end of the Republic. We see, we date it actually through things like this. Here's a coin, a denarius, which is a silver coin about the size of a dime here, where even there we can see about the middle of the first century BCE that the portraits, and this is the time that you start to get Romans putting their portraits on coins for the first time, that the portraits have a sense of that kind of realism there as well. What I wanted to do was to look at some portraits, just to run through some portraits of the period that are not necessarily veristic, but to talk about that a little bit. The first one that I want to look at is this one here, which is veristic, which shows a Roman general from Tivoli. It's from one of the great temples at Tivoli. It's rather this incongruous image here. It's not created later. This is an actual Roman pastiche of creating, putting a portrait of that kind on the body, on the kind of idealized body of an athlete here, but with the trappings of a Roman general. According to my colleague Andrew Stewart, who's at Berkeley, and I seem to spend my career disagreeing with everything anyone at Berkeley says, but he said that it is a pastiche, a piece of pure kitsch, a monster of inauthenticity. To our eyes, yes, that's true. Would that have been the case to Roman eyes? I don't think so. This wouldn't have been kitsch. This would have been really an image of an individual wearing a costume. Arisa Bonfante, the famous scholar of Italian and Roman costumes, said, nudity is costume, because it is in the classical world. That's exactly what it is here. No one in Rome would have actually thought that this guy had this body. What they would have thought was, yes, this is the kind of body, in a way, the ideal that he has. It wouldn't have been inauthentic. It wouldn't have been real, but there's a difference between what is real and what is authentic, I would say here. I think then it gets, really it's all about our modern cult. We care about authenticity, a different kind of authenticity, perhaps. It's an interesting thing to think about when we look at the Torlonia sculptures, because they are all, almost to a one, restored, changed, but changed over hundreds and hundreds of years. Are they any less authentic than I would think about? We also have a very modern concept of search for origins. How did this verism come about? All sorts of articles have been written, everything from Gisela Richter, the famous German expert who worked at the Metropolitan, who thought that this realism came from Egypt, to others that talked about various places in Greece, to Italian traditions, which is what I would emphasize when looking at this kind of thing, to the traditions of portraiture in Italy, in Rome, in Etruscan Italy, in the center of Italy, in Greek Italy, in those areas. Let's look at a few of them here. This is mostly first century BCE here. This period is so very, very interesting. A couple of Etruscan pieces, from Etruscan cities, that are now Roman. This one is from Cervetri on the left, the one on the right is from Tarquinia, and the one on the right does look a lot like Marlon Brando, doesn't it? It does. There is that kind of realism to it. We wouldn't call them veristic at all, but there is a whole interest in realistic portraiture, especially in terracotta, actually in this part of Italy. One of the most beautiful and most interesting ones is this one right here, that's now in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, actually spectacular head, which does begin to have some kind of veristic features to it. Actually, to look at the piece closely, you'd see that there are moles that are shown, that there are flaws, the squint of the eyes, that you're beginning to see some of that here. In trying to find a good image of it for this lecture, I went on the MFA website and saw this marvelous quote here about modern medical imaging technology confirmed that the portrait was made from a mold, from a kind of mask here. I would love to know more, because I can't imagine how you can be absolutely certain of this, but the idea of the mask is something I'll come back to very, very soon, because there is the feeling, certainly, that these veristic portraits, and other portraits as well, are connected to the whole question of mask making. There are some others here. Now look, this is a scenery earned from Volterra, also central Italy, second century BCE as well here, and I think both these people would qualify to have that kind of super-realistic, maybe we should say unflatteringly realistic kind of look. The man there, certainly. This is undoubtedly, from my point of view, a man and his wife. I think some people have said this is a demon here lying on a couch with him, which I think is just absolute nonsense. I think this really is a couple. There's a whole history of couples on Etruscan sarcophagi, which actually, if you think of what's upstairs, it ends up even with Roman couples reclining on couches as well. But here, and this is terracotta here, wonderfully modeled terracotta, you can see that there's the same kind of interest, just as there is in even earlier sarcophagi. This is the famous one of the magistrate. This fellow, Larus Poulainas, is an Etruscan aristocrat who has a whole scroll that has an inscription on it that tells you all about him, all about his accomplishments, and so on. He also has that kind of unflatteringly realistic feel to him. I think there's a whole tradition that can connect to this. Now, we also look at other kinds of portraits of this period that connect in a way. We have to mention the Arringatore. This one is actually an Etruscan aristocrat who has become a Roman senator. No question about it, there's an inscription in Etruscan on the back that tells us about him. Also usually dated around 50 BCE here, where you get this kind of italic sense of a realistic portrait of an individual. But the most interesting of all is this one right here, the Capitoline Brutus, that some people would like to see as the antecedent of this kind of realism. This is a wonderful one, and it's the head here. Ignore the bust. It's the head here that we're looking at. It's in bronze. It's this whole kind of italic Etruscan tradition of full-scale lost-wax casting in bronze. He is variously dated to as early as the 3rd century BCE, to as late as the period that we're talking about here, the 1st century BCE. But there's a sense of that kind of realism to him that we think feeds into what we see at the end of the Republic when it's all about looking very, very traditionally Roman. Renuccio Bianchi Bandinelli actually talked about, one of the great art historians, about a mid-italic style of portraiture and representation. That, I think, is what we're looking at here. I think this whole so-called central italic tradition. I mention Renuccio Bianchi Bandinelli because there's a story that connects him to the Torlonia collection. He was someone I knew as a student. When I was 19 years old and went off to excavate in Italy, I met him. He was a famous art historian, a famous archaeologist as well. He was both. He had been writing about this kind of thing for decades, and he was very, very kind to me. He was an interesting individual. He was a Sienese count who was also a communist. He was called the Red Count, and he'd survived the fascist period and made it past that. But because of his politics, even though he was a count, he was not allowed to go see the Torlonia collection. They wouldn't let him in. So he snuck in as a janitor. Now, if that story is true or not, I don't know, but it was certainly thought. So Renuccio Bianchi Bandinelli, the janitor count, wrote very, very compellingly about this kind of tradition here. That style, from his point of view, is a determinant of social class, and that patricians tended to use Greek idealization except for that one period when they were looking for something very, very Roman, which is what Veristic is all about. I just show you this because this is 50 years in the other direction. This is about 100 years after much of what we just saw here. The banker at Pompeii, Lucius Caelius Iucundus, who has his portrait set up in Pompeii. He's not Veristic, I would say, but he is certainly very, very realistic and very unpatrician in the way that he portrays himself. So, Verism. What is it? Physiognomy is character. We've already talked about that. It's about male virtue. It's only used for men, pretty much. We can put a lot of Latin words on it. It's about virtue, dignity. Being Roman, I think, is really what this kind of portrait is about. This fellow here is saying, I am Roman. The way you define yourself is not by what you are, but what you're not. What he is not is really anything Etruscan. What he is not is anything Greek. He is Roman to the core. So, what he is not is the stereotypical Etruscan, the obese, fat, happy, loving, fun-loving Etruscan that you see on Etruscan urns, like this one right here. The complete opposite of the tough soldier in his old age who is still willing to serve his country. What he is not is anything Greek. I hope you're all shocked a little bit as you look to what you're seeing on the left. There is our old Roman, polarized. I found this on the internet. I'm so pleased with myself to have found this kind of thing. I put it up here for you just because it's creepy, isn't it? He is creepy. He's like something out of a Tolkien Middle Earth kind of thing, one of those creatures. I looked at it carefully, and it is the photograph of our tortulonia attrition with color added, sepia tones, and a little bit of color, and the pupils filled in here. It does remind us that statues in the ancient world were all painted, colored in one way or another. This is not a proper reconstruction here. Please don't think that. When we see a proper reconstruction of one, they shock us. They don't look anything like what we see today. That's true for the Greek statues as well. In any case, what he does not want to be is, as we look at the famous spear bearer here, Polykleitos, he does not want to be at all anything Greek. I have to quote Cato here, the elder, who warned the Romans many, many times about anything Greek. When the Greeks give us their writings, they will corrupt everything. From his point of view, they did corrupt everything. At least, they certainly changed the attitudes of the Roman Empire. In a way, what we're seeing, I think, with the old Roman at the end of the Republic is almost a throwback, a yearning for the traditions of hundreds of years before. Do remember that when we talk about the Romans, we're talking about almost a millennium. The Romans kick out the Etruscans in 509 BC. They then have almost 500 years of a Republic. Between the time of the beginning of the Republic and the height of the Empire, those portraits that you see upstairs, the emperors like Hadrian and Trajan, we're talking 6-700 years of time. There is something very old-fashioned to the kind of verism that we see in that wonderful portrait upstairs. One more portrait here, because this to me is the one that defines also what being Roman, what being a Roman aristocrat is all about, the Barberini Togatos, the man wearing a toga from the Barberini collection, which is all about identity and ancestry. The head of the statue is not original to it, so ignore the head. But what is correct, what is really there, are these two portraits. He's beautifully arranged his toga. He's got the perfect kind of curve on it. He is presenting himself as an aristocratic Roman in his costume, in his stance, and the way that he holds those two portraits, which are undoubtedly the portraits of his ancestors here. He holds one, and he almost lovingly wraps his hand around the second one. He defines himself by these portraits, which we know actually is an important custom, was an important custom in ancient Rome. You defined yourselves by the ancestors that you had. Presumably, these are ancestors who have achieved great things for Rome, who have achieved high rank. Your family tree really defines you over and over again. It would be quite a challenge to be what the Romans call a new man. A new man in Rome was a man who didn't have illustrious ancestors, who couldn't have that kind of... Cicero was one great example of that, who didn't have the kind of ancestry that would have helped him in politics, created the connections, done all the things that would have been important for military and political service. These two portraits are interesting because they also connect to this idea that we have that portraiture is connected to the making of wax masks, because the Immaginis Majorum, the great, the important images for the Romans, were the masks of ancestors. Masks that were made in wax and displayed in cabinets in the atrium, in the heart of a Roman house. They would have been displayed. Often, the cabinets would have been kept closed. On special occasions, the cabinets would have been opened, and there's an image, a mask, and a titulus, a title, an inscription that goes with it, the name of the individual. Name and face are the two things that define individuals and that create memory of individuals. These masks, we know, were treated in special ways on special occasions. If something had happened with family celebrations, they could have laurel put on them. But more importantly, when there was a funeral, we have this beautifully described by the historian, the Greek historian Polybius, when there's a funeral, the masks are taken out and actors are hired who put on the proper costumes and wear the masks. It would have been a little tough in the summer with wax masks, but presumably it'd be done, and wear the masks. In the funeral procession, the actors would march, recreating the ancestors. The ancestors would come back to life in a very theatrical way in a funeral procession. Polybius actually says, what could be grander than one of these great families, the Gens, Iulia, or something like that, when there's a funeral, and then there's a whole oration as well, but the whole family tree takes physical reality and marches through town down to the forum where the oration is held. These masks, these imaginis, are really, really important, I think, to this, if nothing else, even though we've never found one, if nothing else, to the whole idea of identity and memory in the Roman Republic, at least. Now, some of you were here in October when Brian Rose lectured to us. Were any of you here for that? Shame on you, you weren't. He did. He gave this wonderful lecture on female portraiture, and Brian is a dear friend and was a colleague at the University of Pennsylvania. I show him here because he did experimental archaeology, and actually this is all on the web. If you're interested, there he is smiling away. He shouldn't be smiling like that. He wants to be properly Roman. Everyone's smiling here, which is a big problem. They actually made these masks and discovered that you can't actually make a wax mask. You have to make a plaster mask first, and then take the wax mask and make it from that. They succeeded in doing so. I just want to point out, since I don't want Brian to outdo me, that I've had students who have done the same kind of thing with Flavian hairstyles, like the thing on the right. I had two female students. This is before we had Instagram, so I can't document it. They spent a semester trying to figure out how to do those crazy Flavian hairstyles with everything wound up in the back. It took an armature, it took metal, it took all kinds of endless hairspray and things like that to create something like this. But I think this is the kind of thing we should be doing, because we know this kind of thing. We know it happened. How does that work? But these Imogenists, again, clearly connected to this kind of heuristic tradition, I think. An interesting thing is that the idea of the mask actually has an antecedent that goes way back in Italy to the Etruscans. That's not a very well-known thing, but we have three or four Etruscan tombs. These are these famous painted tombs from Tarquinia. The Tomb of the Augurs here is one of them, where we have an individual, you can hear, called a fersu, who wears a mask and usually oversees a horrible kind of, almost like a gladiatorial contest, in this case between a man whose head has been covered with a sack and who is battling, so blindfolded in a way, a fierce dog here holding a club. A blood sport is going on here. This fersu character is identified with an inscription is identified. We don't know if fersu is actually the divinity fersu, the demon fersu, or an actor in this case who has put on the mask of fersu. But the mask, the fersu, is also the Etruscan word that gives us our word persona. It gives us the Latin word persona. Fersu is persona. The mask is persona. Of course, it connects the theater to the whole idea of putting on the mask, becoming something else. What exactly it is you become, I don't know. In the Etruscan world, it could be you could become semi-divine or something like that. But in the Roman world, of course, the mask is all about elite identity because those masks, again, are patrician kinds of things, and only men who achieve a certain rank would ever have them. They had to be an aedile or above to have your mask made and displayed in the atrium. By the way, the cabinets in the atrium were sacred. If you sold a house in Rome and the cabinets of the ancestors were there and you didn't take them with you, they couldn't be touched. They couldn't be altered. They had to remain there even if someone else owned that house. There's lots of evidence in earlier Italy of the importance of the mask. Burials where you have cinerary urns, these are also 6th to 5th century BCE from central Italy where the mask is what is added to kind of create, to finish the image here. You can see this one here has, we don't know what the mask would have been made of. There are also bronze masks as well here that are added to these cinerary urns. So there's a whole tradition that goes back in Italy centuries before that finds its way eventually into the kind of bearism that we see with the old man from Tricoli. We don't have, we have never found any of these masks, which is very strange, and at Pompeii especially you would think that we would find them, but they may have been accustomed, really restricted to Rome, to Roman aristocrats in the city of Rome. But there is one house, the beautiful house of the Menander in Pompeii that does have a shrine. So here we've gone from, not in the atrium, that was the atrium you see here on the left, not in the atrium, but in the courtyard, the peristyle behind there, way back in this corner over here, there is a shrine. And these, all we have here are plaster casts of what must have been made of wood or something, or it could have been made of wax or whatever, that of objects that were found in that shrine. So this is the closest that we get to any kind of household shrine where ancestors might have been displayed. I said I'd show you one slide from men and women, and this, it is this funerary relief from the Via Statilia that I show you here, same time period, end of the first century BCE, and a husband and wife that are shown here, and I think he qualifies, doesn't he? Kind of fits that veristic kind of tradition that we've been talking about here. What's fascinating is that he is shown realistically, the woman is shown in much more idealized fashion. This style is really restricted to men. So I think that's about all we can say in terms of gender issues and verism. I did want to talk a little about imperial portraiture as well, because there's such wonderful examples of it upstairs. So imperial portraiture, the great cliche is when we talk about imperial portraiture is that it tends to be highly idealized, of course, because the emperors were creating images that were circulated around the empire, either on coins or in portraits that were copied and set up in all the different provinces. So it's quintessentially public and tends to be highly idealized, very, very carefully worked out. Republican portraiture is very different. It is much more private. Even if it's a public portrait, it is not something that's circulated widely. And there were even issues sometimes with the whole idea of public portraiture. Cato, our dear friend Cato the Elder, once said he would much rather explain to people why there wasn't a public statue of him than why there was a public statue of him, because there is this kind of stigma to that kind of publicness, in a way, to the republican identity, that in a way you're going too far. You're reaching above any kind of station that you should have if you have a public portrait of yourself. But anyway, this is the general way of looking at things. I thought I would show you, though, that even in the empire, there are moments when emperors decide to go back to something more real, something more connected with the proper physicality. Vespasian, for instance, the first Flavian emperor who takes over after the crisis of 68 AD. He's our tough Roman general. He doesn't have the high rank that one would expect in terms of his family, but he wins the civil war. He takes over and deliberately shows himself as kind of a real guy here, a good kind of Roman. In his coins, certainly, in these beautiful bronze coins that you see here, and even in his portraits. Vespasian was famously—this is after Nero and after the disaster of Nero—is famously going back to good traditional, more republican kind of values, including thriftiness. He was famous because he taxed urine in the Roman empire. If any of you can know how that's done, to this day I've been wondering how you tax urine, but anyway, he did. Again, he had a treasury that had been pretty much blown away by Nero. So Vespasian, and certainly even after the three Flavian emperors, the emperor Nerva, who takes over in 96 AD, also tries to connect to those more traditional kinds of images. From this very time here, I just show you one thing here that, to me, really indicates the importance of the mask and the face and the image here. These are reliefs that are in the Vatican today. They're called the Concertina reliefs, and they're very stereotypical things. They're very beautiful, but very stereotypical images of the emperors as they're departing, as the emperors as they're arriving in Rome. They're things that would have been set up in Rome, but could have been set up everywhere within the empire. They're really kind of generic, and they're not real in any way at all. If you look at them, they've got things like Roma herself here, the genius of the Roman people, all these kinds of things here. This one is fascinating because it's Flavian. It's the dynasty of Vespasian and Titus and Domitian, the youngest son of the emperor Vespasian, but it is re-carved. There's a Donatio Memoria, the memory of the third of those emperors. Domitian is eradicated by the Senate, because he was a disaster in many ways, so he is assassinated and Nerva takes over. What do they do? They actually re-carve the head of Domitian into the head of the new emperor Nerva. You can see the head is a little too small. You look at it there, and if you look at this image right here, you can see where the original outline of the head would have been. It has to be a little bit smaller because they had to re-tool it. This isn't something that just happened with the Torlonias. This happened in the ancient world. You could re-carve an image, but the important thing is not the body, it is the face and the inscription, the name. Those are the things that are eradicated and changed. That is what defines an individual, which is why Roman portraiture is so interesting and why the Romans really, if you think of the great contributions of the Romans in the history of art, it is portraiture. It's historical relief. Those are the things where they're really incredibly innovative. The final question I want to ask is the question of display. This is what I write about here. Let's look at how things were not displayed in the ancient world, whether it's here in the Kimbell or in one of my favorite museums in the world, in the Soane Museum in London, where John Soane takes antiquity and recreates a whole world around here. I just want to say kudos for the exhibit upstairs. It is so beautifully, beautifully exhibited. Particularly the part in the back with the Roman emperors, in a way, starts to connect to the idea of how those images might have been displayed in sets or in series. It's not easy to display a whole set of white statues. I tried to do a whole set of Greek vases back 20 years ago, and we were successful, but we really had to think about how to do this thing. Well done, Kimbell, in terms of this beautiful display here. Let's think a little bit, maybe, is there any evidence for how the old patrician, any of these portraits that we see, how they would have been displayed in the ancient world. There is some evidence of that, and it wouldn't have been like this. This is the Capitoline Museum here, where you have an emperor looking sadly around, surrounded by Greek philosophers here. This is not the way that it would have worked. It would have worked in a much more ordered and much more didactic kind of way. We have a sense, in two places, we have a sense of that. There's a wonderful article written by Sheila Dillon, right about 2000, on subject selection and viewer reception, which is exactly what we're talking about here, of Greek portraits is what she was looking at, but we could talk about Greek and Roman portraits together here, and she talked about the Villa of Cassius at Tivoli, which was excavated in the end of the 18th century by Pope Pius VI, and we see Pope Pius VI here on the right in a portrait by Bottoni, where the villa was excavated and a whole series of portraits was found, but that whole series of portraits we cannot put it back together again because it was excavated in a very 18th century way, and that is, it was dug up and there was no record of the exact spot and how these pieces were put together. Although, if we look at what was found there, and this is going to be slightly later than the period we're talking about, what was found there was that you had portraits of Greeks and others, and they were connected to images of muses, and the muses are the muse of comedy and the muse of tragedy, and the muses hold masks, and the whole idea of the portrait then is a kind of theater of images, theater of masks, if you will, theater of memory is the way that I like to look at it, and the one on the right, of course, is a very famous kind of portrait, lots of those, and it's identified again by image and inscription, Pericles, this is Pericles, actually even tells us he's Athenian here, so he's identified for us by the inscription and by the image, both here. So, we can certainly get a sense from this villa here, even though it was really difficult to put that together, of the kind of display that would have been in an aristocratic residence, where visitors would have come, they would have met the owner, they would have wandered through there, and they would have looked upon the images of great men, and we are talking about great men in this case here, specifically. What I have been working on for decades, actually, is the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum, which was part, was connected to our show at the Meadows last year of the legacy of Vesuvius, and we see it here in a reconstruction, and we see on the right a replica of it, the famous villa of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu, because the Villa of the Papyri is still underground. It's 60 feet under at Herculaneum, but it produced the largest collection of ancient sculptures that we have from any single building in the ancient world, and that's what I have written about for a very, very long time. And guess what? When we look at some of the images from that villa, we do find that the atrium of the house, and here's the atrium, this is how you enter in here through the atrium, and then you go into courtyards. The atrium of the house has images that are definitely portraits of ancestors. I'm not sure if this is veristic. He's got a, look at me, okay? He's trying to be a little bit veristic there in the center of his mouth here. This is an ancestor who was a flamen. He had a kind of priest magistrate here. So we do have that sense of the private part of the house with the ancestors, and then you go through to the rest of the house, and you find, and this is the Getty here that kind of reconstructs things, you find that in the garden of the courtyards here, there were paired sets of statues. I show you this one on the left, which is Naples Archaeological Museum with some of the statues 30 years ago. It's a good example of how not to display antiquity. They now become celebrities, so the display is very, very different, but you don't, you know, the coat rack and the white walls and the white dirty bases are not exactly the way to do it, as we know, but what we do have are pairs of images. They're all men, and there are lots of different pairs, but there are only two women, and the women are goddesses, and the women, one of them is Athena, you can, or Minerva, you can identify her very, very easily on the right. The other one is Hestia Vesta, the goddess of the hearth, and what they are doing in these, with these portraits, and we can identify some of them. Some of them actually have inscriptions on them that have been read. Others can be identified because they're such famous individuals. You have those, you know, good, good, crazy, wild-haired academics, philosophers, like the one here on the far left, or good, hard-working generals and, you know, great achievers of that kind, comparing what leisure and action, autium, leisure, what the villa is for, kind of an escape from real life, and the fact that you also cannot escape from real life, and you have the achievers also compared to them. Very didactic kind of display here, and it's also connected, and I wrote an article about this back in the 90s and have written about it since, to the idea of philosophers and others and expressing very, very Roman values, and the value of the cursus honorum, the whole idea of achievement, great, and family achievement, and the ancestor kind of commemoration that we talked about a little earlier. So this is our one example of how some of these things would have been displayed in a Roman villa. There is no other setting where we can even get close to how things would have been seen, but I think Sheila Dillon has got it right here when she says, you know, the portraits of historical personages made the past present, and that applies to your ancestor portraits as well. It was a way of recreating the past. My own, that's her quote there, my own argument has been that this interest in historical documentation, which is so very, very Roman, and it's all about the documentation of the family and family traditions, created kind of memory scapes that also use the Greek past to define the past in a way. It doesn't just make the past present. The past defines the present in a way. Thank you.