The book under review is the author’s lightly revised 2018 Freiburg PhD thesis. Its stated goal is to collect and discuss portraits of imperial-period cult personnel in Rome and Italy, including funerary reliefs, funerary and honorific statues, portrait busts and isolated heads. The central objective is to identify iconographies chosen for members of various cults and to contextualise their portraits within the broader Roman portrait habit and within Roman religion.
The introduction offers background on Roman status groups, dress and other indicators of rank, along with a brief overview of scholarship on cults, offices and insignia used to identify them. A section on the state of the art follows, with recent bibliography on portraiture in general and cult personnel in particular, before outlining objectives and methodology. Ch. 2 surveys imperial-period depictions of Roman religious cults based on existing research. The core of the book, chs 3–10, treats individual cults and their personnel: augurs, fratres arvales, flamines and salii (both marked by the apex cap), vestal virgins, luperci, vicomagistri, and members of the Isis and Magna Mater cults. The final chapter offers a synthesis of general conclusions. Abstracts in English and Italian, as well as catalogues of portraits and generic images, complete the volume. The book is richly illustrated including a significant number of colour images, all good quality, which make it easy to follow the argument. Editing is careful, with very few errors.
Each chapter begins with a summary of the relevant cult, its origins, mythologies and personnel. Generic images are then considered for evidence on cult practices and iconographies, before portraits linked to the cult are identified, explained, and — where possible — set in their display context. The catalogue includes 87 portraits, 56 of them from Rome and its environs. Members of state cults predominate; the only non-state cults whose priests or initiates are identifiable are those of Isis and Magna Mater. One of the study’s most important conclusions is that the attributes and habitus in portraits of cult personnel, although drawn from a repertoire known from literary sources and generic images, carry little documentary value: they were selected for their suitability within a broader programme of self-representation but do not depict standardised priestly garb.
A brief but intriguing discussion of portraits outside Rome and Italy (248–9) shows that none of the cult personnel studied here are represented beyond Italy, except for women associated with Isis, mainly from Athens. Male priests are generally rare in portraiture, though at Palmyra 18% of all male portraits identify them as such. S. highlights the striking discrepancy between these low numbers and the ubiquity of sacrificial gestures, especially libations, in Roman art, where they function as markers of individual pietas.
Despite the book’s merits, its contribution is limited. The concluding chapter in particular does not move far beyond previous work. The discussion of priesthoods as markers of social status remains superficial and would have benefited from engagement with Emily Hemelrijk’s work on the importance of cults for female representation and status, and of Susanne Muth’s new interpretations of the, mostly public, roles depicted on vita romana sarcophagi. Inscriptions, even those on the monuments discussed, are largely ignored — except in the Magna Mater chapter, where the author could draw on an existing publication. This omission prevents exploration of differences between elite and freedman contexts or comparison between epigraphic and visual references to cult affiliation. As a result, the study describes phenomena carefully but rarely probes them in depth.
Several major questions go unanswered. No explanation is given for the rarity of priestly portraits beyond the hardly satisfactory claim that Roman portraits tended to integrate individuals through normative habitus. Why does Rome dominate the portrait habit, as Athens and Palmyra do in the provinces? Why are state cults overrepresented? Why do portraits of Vestal Virgins only begin in the second century c.e.? Is the decline of Isis priests’ portraits after the first century c.e. really due to reluctance to appear in a non-normative habitus, even as Magna Mater cult members begin to feature more often? And why do female initiates of the Isis cult only start to be depicted when portraits of their male counterparts cease? How much is the evidence shaped by monument type? Are not salii only recognisable in narrative contexts or when depicted on horseback? What does it mean that vicomagistri appear only collectively on compital altars but never individually? Would we even recognise them in individual portraits outside this context? How likely is it that not only galli but also archigalli and sacerdotes of Magna Mater were castrated and generally regarded as deviant outsiders when they are depicted in their monuments as citizens in the toga and even in calcei senatorii?
The book thus raises as many questions as it answers. This, however, is one of its strengths: it provides a solid and reliable foundation from which further research can proceed. It is a careful study, grounded in thorough knowledge of the secondary literature, with a valuable catalogue and useful discussion of relevant images. Readers will appreciate that the author examines not only the individual sculptures but also their place within the cults and their broader role in Roman society. The book can be recommended to anyone entering the field, including advanced undergraduates — provided they read German.
