Bust of Antoninus Pius

Bust of Antoninus Pius

The bust, with a tunic and a cuirass, is covered by a sumptuous cloak fastened on the right shoulder with a round buckle. The head of the figure faces rightwards. The man has short curly hair, a soft short beard, eyes sunken in their sockets below protruding arched eyebrows, and two deep furrows between lips and nose. From the iconographic perspective, it recalls types created during the second half of the reign of Antoninus Pius. The busts and portraits of the emperor, often mass-produced, were full-scale icons used as a tool of propaganda and an affirmation of the state’s authority. The sculptor made the work using techniques that allowed mass production: from an initial block of stone, a rough-out of a cube was made for the head, arranged diagonally with respect to the large piece used for the bust, in order to create a slight rotation to one side. A sort of oval was then made, selecting certain key points such as the point of the chin, the ear-lobe or the tip of the beard, if there was one; all the points were marked on the surface and measured with a pair of calipers, so that they were equidistant from the curl of the hair at the centre of the forehead. The surfaces of the face, such as the temples, cheeks and sides of the nose were then cuts. As early as the mid-second century AD, sculptors created the finishing touches by reproducing the grain of the skin, playing on the contrast between rough-smooth and matt-shiny. The result was an animated, expressive sculpture which could easily be reproduced to make a series of works for display all over the empire.