Dietrich Boschung

Boschung's attempt in chapter 4 (pp. 66-82) to date individual surviving replicas and versions of Augustus's various portrait types constitutes one of the most problematic aspects of his work. Only a terminus post quem or a terminus ante quem can be established for most of the portraits. Contributing to the dating problem is the fact that Augustus, who was deified after his death, played an important role in the dynastic politics of subsequent principes and so his image continued to be reproduced during the principates of his successors. It is often extremely difficult, in any case, to date an individual work on stylistic grounds alone because of eclecticism and variability in workshop practices. Demonstrative of this problem is the case of the handsome portrait of Augustus from Ariccia in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (cat. no. 80, pls. 119.3, 120), which has been dated from Angustan to Hadrianic times (Boschung places it in the period of Caligula). Similarly, a portrait of Augustus from Fondi in the Museo Nazionale di Napoli (cat. no. 16, p1. 26), combining a softened form of classicizing elements with lively, plastically carved hair locks, has been variously dated because of its stylistic treatment. Boschung (pp. 17, 61-62, 75, 83) classifies this work as a Neuschopfung (new creation) dependent on the Alcudia type (but probably even more so, in my opinion, on the Prima Porta type); he dates it, apparently correctly, to the Caligulan period because a pattern of hair locks behind the left ear compares fairly well with that found in some of Caligula's portraits. [39] Nevertheless, a strikingly close stylistic comparison of the general treatment of facial features and hair locks can also be made with Augustus's numismatic image on a cistophori series from Pergamon (27-25 B.C.E., p. 61 and n. 255, p1. 239.4), showing that such a portrait could also have existed some fifty years earlier. A great range of stylistic possibilities within a classicizing style (from a hard, cold, academic treatment to a softer, more mo deled and plastic one) can also be demonstrated within just the latter half of the Augustan Principate in the extant portraits of Augustus's grandsons and adopted sons Gaius and Lucius. [40] The vast majority of their portraits are datable to the latter part of the Augustan period because these youths were important only to Augustus's dynastic plans and played no significant role after his death in 14 C.E. Augustus's portraits can be dated more securely when they either bear a strong and intentional physiognomic resemblance to his successors or have been recut from portraits of his successors who suffered a "damnatio memoriae," or, more accurately, a memoria damnata (damned memory), after their death. [41]

In chapter 5 (pp. 83-91), Boschung discusses and attempts to explain the distribution (based on known provenance) of each of Augustus's different portrait types in four general regions: (1) Rome and Italy, (2) the western provinces, (3) the eastern Greek provinces, and (4) Egypt. Some of his reasoning is speculative. For example, Boschung assumes that unless carved in a distinctly local style, most of the marble portraits of the earlier iconographic types from the western provinces were imported from Rome or Italy. It is difficult to believe, however, that there were not also local sculptors (at least in the main Roman centers of the western provinces) capable of producing high-quality Rome-style portraits based on imported plaster or clay models. Some of these sculptors may even have originally come from Rome, elsewhere in Italy, or Greece. Although there was relatively little good-quality marble available locally in the western provinces, it does not mean that raw marble could not have been imported and ca rved in workshops in some of the larger western Roman centers. Are we to assume, for example, that the high-quality architectural sculptures of the Augustan Temple of Gaius and Lucius (Maison Carree) [42] were carved in Rome and shipped to Nimes?