Magistrate

The beautiful statue represents a young magistrate of the Ancient Rome. He wears closed shoes with laces on his feet; the body is covered by a tunic that is held at the waist with a belt in order to create a lapel that descends along the sides, and above it, a cloak fixed by a round fibula on the left shoulder. A rather ancient and difficult iconography to interpret, although it is possible to attempt a comparison with the statue of personifications, of seasons or of a Roman province. The closest examples, in style and clothing, are a relief figure of one of the personifications of the Roman provinces (Dacia or Bithynia) which embellished the marvelous monumental complex of the Hadrianeum, the temple dedicated to the memory of the emperor Hadrian and raised in Campo Marzio by his successor Antonino Pio.

Actually, our work doesn’t refer to a male figure: as we learn from the caption accompanying the drawing made by the sculptor Santo Varni, it depicts a headless female statue dressed in a chiton with rich and elegant folds. The head, in fact, is not pertinent, and it is a recent addition, probably occurred on the occasion of the new staging of the statue at Villa Paola in Moncalieri. With a very worn marble surface, it depicts a young man without the beard and with wavy but flat locks in the back and fuller and moved in the front. A curiosity: the breast, prosperous and evident in Varni’s drawing, is subsequently leveled so as to better adapt the head to the body, in a time where gender ambiguity was peculiar only to the deities and their procession.

Archive documents allow us to reconstruct its “history”: the statue was recovered in 1871 in Tortona, the ancient roman Dertona, during the construction of new arcades and it immediately entered Varni’s ancient collection. Nowadays, we still don’t know the context of origin, probably a public building, one of the many that had to enrich and decorate the Forum: it is known that Rome wanted to homologate to its urban and environmental model (through the practice of centuriation) all the indigenous centers which it came into contact with during military campaigns.

Dertona, a town of Ligurian origins and ascribed to the Pomptina tribe - one of the 35 tribes created by Augustus to organize the new pacified territory – presents an uncertain date, widely debated in the bibliography: according to Velleio Patercolo, an author at the turn of the 1st century BC and the 1st century AD, Dertona would be founded around 120 BC.