Of the ancient objects that have come down to us, few are as numerous as the representations of Roman emperors. Sculpted portraits have survived by the thousands; their minted counterparts have done so by the millions. Regarding sources about their production, however, practically the opposite is true: little is known about the workshops and mints in which sculptures and coins were produced. In this work, a revised version of his doctoral dissertation, N. uses the immense number of surviving sculpted and minted portraits to reveal the world behind their production. As the title suggests, he does so by zooming in on the portraits of Faustina the Younger and Marcus Aurelius, meticulously analysing the details of the sculptures and coin obverses to draw insightful conclusions that may be extended to portraiture of Roman emperors in general.
As N. states in the introduction, the study is an attempt to examine the supposed connection between coin and sculpture production. It provides a first systematic counterpart to the objections to K. Fittschen's classic ‘imperial portrait system’ as expressed by J. Fejfer (Roman Portraits in Context [2008], pp. 407–19). According to Fittschen, Roman imperial portraiture and its typology was a centralised phenomenon, in which historical events played a pivotal role in the commissioning and subsequent creation of new portrait types. N. instead proposes a model that is far more flexible concerning the agency, motivations and processes underlying ancient portraiture, and one that problematises the close association between the mint and the marble workshops.
In the eleven chapters that the book contains, introduction and conclusion included, N. treats his material in a well-structured fashion. He starts by discussing the coin portraits (Chapter 2) and sculptured portraits of Faustina (Chapter 3) before synthesising them in the fourth chapter, and does the same for Marcus Aurelius in Chapters 5–7. The manufacturing processes of coinage (Chapter 8) and sculpture (Chapter 9) are subsequently addressed separately. These are brought together, along with the insights from Chapters 2–7, in Chapter 10, in which N. lays down his revised model. The book also contains a densely filled bibliography, a two-page index and 106 pages containing high-quality images of the discussed coins and sculptures. Due to an overall lack of up-to-date catalogues of the sculpted portraits of Faustina and Marcus, the seven-page overview of their extant portraits is a welcome addition.
N.'s work contains a thorough (re)assessment of the typology of the portraits of Faustina and Marcus. It thereby sheds light on the reasons for the introduction of new types as well as on the question who was responsible for creating them. For Faustina's portrait types, N. debunks Fittschen's hypothesis that the many portrait types of this empress corresponded to the birth of her children, as a revised typology is convincingly set against its chronology, that of Faustina's children, and the reverse types with which the coin portraits were combined. N. offers the alternative reading that the high number of portrait types for Faustina reflected imperial involvement in contemporary aristocratic portrait trends and that historical events only played a minor role. He does nevertheless admit that the fact that Faustina received her own portrait in the first place was due to her role in assuring dynastic continuity. This an important observation about the representation of imperial women that perhaps should have been contextualised in the light of Faustina's female predecessors, who remain unmentioned.
Whereas for Faustina N. further complicates existing typologies, he essentially does the opposite for Marcus’ portraiture. He argues against an urge in modern scholarship to subdivide the four core types, by showing a lack of similarity within the suggested subtypes. Again, the importance of historical events is downplayed for changes in typology, as updates more likely demonstrated maturation as a reflection of dynastic continuity. To bring the message home, Chapter 7 ends with a brief comparison with the typology of Lucius Verus, which developed along similar lines.
N. goes into the tiniest details in the typological discussions in the first part, and he regularly draws attention to what these details tell us about the production of the portraits. The latter takes centre stage in Chapters 8–9, which focus on the mint and the marble workshops. N. discusses the little that is known about these venues, and he draws attention to details in the coins and sculptures to make parts of the production processes visible to modern observers. In particular, his discussion of how dies were treated and designed in antiquity is of great value for our understanding of ancient coin design.
Chapter 10 brings together the previous chapters, upon which N. proposes an alternative model for the imperial portrait system. Noticing similarities as much as differences in the details between portraits on coins and those in marble, N. claims that at times mints and workshops generated their own updates to types that had previously been commissioned, creating new types in the process. These updated types could be just as influential to future portrait-carving, thus assigning to the mints and workshops a greater degree of agency in typological developments than previously recognised. Indeed, it goes against the central premise of Fittschen's model, which held that every type derived from a centrally commissioned prototype that was simultaneously made available at both the mint and the marble workshops. Compared to this classic model, N.'s revised model does greater justice to the complex mechanisms he lays down in the preceding chapters.
The book should be lauded for the complete and painstakingly careful treatment of its source material. In terms of a work that in exceptional fashion combines numismatic and portrait studies, N. is well-versed in both domains. For the numismatic material, differences between coins and medallions are taken into account as are those between coins of different denominations. As for sculpture, the focus is on the far better-preserved marble portraits, but bronzes do not fall outside of the book's scope. Although N. makes it explicit that the focus is on portraits of metropolitan produce, he does not shy away from occasionally making comparisons with provincial material. His reflection on the provincial implications of his adjusted model (pp. 89–91) is especially insightful and begs for further research.
The prose is overall strong, save for a few unnecessary double negatives (e.g. pp. 88–9: ‘[it] cannot be ruled out that some sculptured types were not officially commissioned’). Particularly in the chapters in which the typology is laid down, the writing tends to become rather dense and technical. It is useful in this respect that in Chapter 2 tables are added in which N.'s typology of the portrait is set against earlier ones. For comprehensibility's sake, it is unfortunate that Marcus’ portraits have not received similar visual treatment, even if understandable against the background of hardly adjusting existing typologies. Likewise, N.'s version of the ‘imperial portrait system’ would have benefited from a schematic visualisation, especially given its importance for our understanding of these processes.
This book is a must-read for anyone dealing with the intricate workings of Roman imperial portraiture. Its systematic way of comparing numismatic material with portraits presents imperial representation as a multifaceted and dynamic process in which ‘the imperial regime’ is defined as a complex network of people. It is hoped that N.'s approach will be followed by many to come, so that his model could be further refined as other imperial portraits of both metropolitan and provincial produce are brought into the picture.
