This generously illustrated, accessible study aims to offer the first in-depth detailed survey of the Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art’s paired portrait busts of Septimius Severus and Julia Domna.[1] It is a sumptuous volume in color featuring numerous full-page figures and two-page spreads, offering the reader not only the details and angles required for a thorough portraiture study, but many pertinent comparanda. The study, co-authored by Julie Van Voorhis (Indiana University) and Mark Abbe (University of Georgia) with contributions from Juliet Graver Istrabadi (Eskenazi Museum), was occasioned by an exhibition featuring the two busts, “Colors of Classical Art,” at the Indiana University Art Museum (now the Eskenazi Museum of Art) in 2014 and curated by Van Voorhis and Istrabadi. While the renovation of the museum (2017-2019) and Covid-19 pandemic significantly delayed its production, the volume still fits well into current scholarship on Roman portraiture, which has seen the release of several thorough studies centering on specific imperial figures in recent years.[2]
Both the titles of the 2014 exhibition and resulting volume give prominence to the portrait busts’ original polychromy, placing the volume in conversation with the numerous written studies centering on color in ancient sculpture.[3] These publications, alongside prominent museum shows—such as “Chroma: Ancient Sculpture in Color (2022-2023)” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art—and international scholarly events—such as the biannual International Round Table on Polychromy in Ancient Sculpture and Architecture series—attest to the sustained interest that polychromy has continued to generate within classical art history since the pioneering exhibition on the topic in 2003, “Bunte Götter: Die Farbigkeit antiker Skulptur.” Yet the attention the title gives to the Eskenazi busts’ polychromy is perhaps misplaced, given that just one of its six chapters focuses on the limited evidence for the busts’ original pigments. Instead, these chapters offer a seriously-considered examination of the techniques, materials, contexts, and subjects of the Eskenazi busts, with thorough reference to other expressions of Severan-era visual and material cultural in and outside of Rome. This is previewed in the comprehensive timeline with which the book opens, in which not only historic events in the lives of Septimius Severus and Julia Domna are detailed, but also significant artistic innovations and architectural dedications.
Chapter 1, “Imperial Colors: Introduction,” stakes out the relevance of this close consideration of portraiture in the 21st century in a visual world saturated with selfies, social media posts, and other largely digital images aiming to shape individual identities. The authors contrast such fluid “portraits” with the perceived formality and permanence of formats such as the Roman portrait bust (21). The chapter contextualizes the Eskenazi busts within their contemporary museum display, highlighting the vividness of encounter that they maintain today and would have further fostered via their original third-century CE polychrome appearance. Frustratingly, an installation view is not shown until Chapter 6, one of the volume’s few minor flaws. It then offers a brief historical background that puts the timeline into narrative form, previews the content to come, and names openly the lacunae in the stories of the Eskenazi busts, both ancient (historical sources’ biases about members of the Severan dynasty, incomplete nature of archaeological record) and modern (absence of knowledge of discovery of portrait busts). Van Voorhis’ and Abbe’s forthcoming approach is maintained throughout the volume, and provides a refreshing, welcome acknowledgement of the particular sorts of challenges that investigators of Roman portraiture can encounter.
Chapter 2, “The Eskenazi Portraits of Septimius Severus and Julia Domna,” offers detailed descriptions of each of the portrait busts, alongside numerous illustrations of the busts themselves and some sculptural comparanda, including one in the Eskenazi Museum itself (Fig. 2.25). Moreover, the chapter offers a brief treatment of the development of the portrait bust format with which the Roman portrait tradition is so strongly associated. The language is clear and accessible: technical terms such as “portrait type” are defined, the numismatic jargon of a coin’s reverse is translated into the more colloquial “tails” side (32), and even more familiar articles of clothing are defined, such as the chiton (50). The overall effect, along with the book’s copious, beautiful illustrations, makes this volume amenable to a readership beyond classical art historians.
Chapter 3, “From Marble to Figure: Carving the Eskenazi Portraits,” focuses on the metamorphosis of marble, from its sourcing, quarrying, and transport to its carving and polishing, into the exquisite likenesses of Septimius Severus and Julia Domna. It also provides a discussion of the marble analysis found in Appendix 1. Nothing is taken for granted: the authors openly ask why such scientific studies are undertaken, what kinds of information sampling analysis can provide, and what implications this holds for the art historical consideration of the portraits (87), a rhetorical move that serves to render the scientific data more approachable and significant to the non-marble specialist.
Chapter 4, “From Art to Life: The Polychromy of the Eskenazi Portraits,” finally delivers the concentrated study on the portraits’ polychromy promised by the emphasis of the volume’s title. In a similarly forthcoming vein as that in Chapter 1, the authors recognize the rather limited quantity of surviving evidence for pigments (100), for which they compensate by offering an array of reconstruction options (Figs. 4.26-29). The multiplicity of possible reconstructions crucially underscores the study’s conjectural nature, which I appreciate in light of the certitude some polychrome studies indicate in their reconstructions. I did find the specific naming of the softwares used to generate the reconstructions (112) somewhat at odds with the generally accessible, non-specialist tone of the volume, and I would have preferred that the reconstructions were ordered differently, so that the reader could examine different versions of Septimius Severus side by side and of Julia Domna side by side instead of as paired portraits, but these are relatively minor quibbles.
Chapter 5, “Portraits, Power, and the Visualization of Dynasty,” situates the Eskenazi busts within the larger context of material culture production during the Severan Dynasty. Occasionally, the contextualization borders on repetitive; for instance, we read about the modern locations of Pannonia and Leptis Magna that were already covered in Chapter 1 (125), the reverse/tails correspondence in coin discussions is stated for the third time in the volume (141), and “nymphaeum” is defined twice in the span of four pages. These redundancies only marginally detract from an overall satisfyingly presented comprehensive survey of Severan artistic and architectural production. I do not agree, however, with the chapter’s concluding proclamation that “Portraits as objects are neutral, but their subjects are not;” indeed, this would seem to deny the artistic choices that the authors have been arguing the makers of the Eskenazi busts employed to create highly effective, emotionally charged encounters between bust and beholder (153). This chapter also contains the only typo in an otherwise impeccably edited volume: Fig. 5.14 is referred to in the text as Fig. 4.14.
Chapter 6, “The Afterlives of the Eskenazi Portraits,” considers the post-Severan history of the pair of busts. The frank discussion of the lack of documentation for the excavation of the busts, the involvement in their history of a dealer known to have been personally involved in the formation of Hermann Göring’s art collection, and the ongoing investigation of the busts’ provenance is welcome at a moment giving increased prominence to antiquities provenance research.[4]
The two appendices, “Marble Analysis” and “Pigment Analysis,” detail the results of the conservation studies undertaken on the busts. In addition to the tables of scientific data, summaries explain these results in clear language accessible to those outside the scientific community. Notes, references, and a full index round out the volume.
Overall, I find the importance placed on the busts’ polychromy overstated given the admittedly scanty surviving evidence of color on their surfaces. A title that suggests the full complexity and breadth of this study rather than highlight the results of, in effect, just one chapter, would have done fuller justice to the volume’s interventions that extend well beyond the reach of polychromy studies.
Despite this misemphasis, the volume makes a timely contribution to Roman portrait studies that will be of interest not only to those working on visual representation and the Severans, but also to those seeking general overviews of ancient sculpting practices and contemporary techniques in marble and pigment analysis, all offered in approachable language and a beautifully-packaged format.
Notes
[1] Eskenazi Musuem of Art 75.33.1 and 75.33.2 respectively.
[2] See, for instance, Peter J. M. Schertz and Bernard Frischer, eds., New Studies on the Portrait of Caligula in the Virigina Museum of Fine Arts, (Leiden: Brill, 2020) and Christian Neiderhuber, Roman Imperial Portrait Practice in the Second Century AD: Marcus Aurelius and Faustina the Younger (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022).
[3] Three recent examples include Felix Henke, Die Farbigkeit der antiken Skulptur: die griechischen und lateinischen Schriftquellen zur Polychromie (Wiesbaden: Reichert Verlag, 2020), Amalie Skovmøller, Facing the Colours of Roman Portraiture: Exploring the Materiality of Ancient Polychrome Forms (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020), and Tuna Şare Ağtürk, The Painted Tetrarchic Reliefs from Nicomedia: Uncovering the Colourful Life of Diocletian’s Forgotten Capital (Turnhout: Brepols, 2021).
[4] See, for instance, Alexandra Carpino, Tiziana D’Angelo, Maya Muratov and David Saunders, eds., Collecting and Collectors. From Antiquity to Modernity (Selected Papers on Ancient Art and Architecture Vol. 4, Archaeological Institute of America, 2018) and John North Hopkins, Sarah Kielt Costello and Paul R Davis, eds., Object Biographies: Collaborative Approaches to Ancient Mediterranean Art (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2021), alongside several provenance-centered sessions at the annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America, most recently in 2023.