Portrait head of so-called Pseudo Seneca

Portrait head of so-called Pseudo Seneca

The head depicts the face of a man of mature years, with clearly marked features, straight hair which falls on his forehead in disorderly fashion almost to the join of the nose, a heavily wrinkled face, bags under the eyes, a moustache and a short beard. Fulvio Orsini suggested that the head was a portrait of Seneca, which was generally accepted until 1813, when the discovery of an authentic portrait of the philosopher, identified by means of the inscription of his name, disproved the idea, giving way to various hypotheses; nowadays the prevailing interpretation is that the head is a portrait of a dramatist due to the presence, on a copy now at the Museo delle Terme at Rome, of an ivy wreath, the prize for theatrical contexts: some scholars specifically identify him as Aristophanes, because the type in question is associated, in a double herm of Villa Albani, with the portrait of Menander; according to other experts, it could be a portrait of Aesop, Hesiod, Callimachus or Apollonius of Rhodes. We can therefore be quite certain that the person depicted must have been extremely famous, as is proven by the large number of copies to survive, which number a total of forty. From the qualitative point of view, the head displays excellent workmanship; rather than a copy, it might well even be the original from which all the others are reproduced, and should be regarded as a portrait of reconstruction in which the accentuated wrinkles and folds of the face and forehead of the man, the intentionally unruly locks and the wrinkly neck contrast openly with the unwavering, penetrating gaze. The original should be ascribed to the trend of realistic virtuosity, dateable to between the third and second century BC.