Portrait Bust of a Woman

The late Republican period saw the development of a new style of portraiture, now known as ‘veristic’. In contrast to classicizing styles, which evoked the youthful beauty of 5th-century BC models, veristic portraits gave visual expression to Republican ideals of frugality, discipline, and authority gained through experience by emphasizing the appearance of age and the affects of hard work in the face of the sitter. As well as showing signs of maturity, this portrait of an older woman wears an unusual head-cloth, which characterizes her as a nurse (nutrix). Nurses in the Roman world were typically either enslaved or were ‘freedwomen’ – former slaves who had been manumitted by their masters. Such head-coverings are sometimes also depicted on funerary reliefs portraying freedwomen. It is possible that the family for whom this woman had worked commissioned the bust on her death. On an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century marble base.