JULIO-CLAUDIAN PERIOD, CIRCA EARLY 1ST CENTURY A.D.

The emperor is here depicted with rounded face and pursed, bow-shaped lips, corners indented. His almond-shaped eyes are unarticulated and slightly recessed, two deep lines above the bridge of his nose accentuating his knitted brows; the layered hair is composed of a mass of comma-shaped locks, with the three characteristic locks at the centre of his forehead, two parted at the centre and one to his right.

The style of the hair places this head within the Prima Porta group of Augustus portraits – named after the famous Roman marble statue found at the villa of Augustus’s wife Livia in 1864 and now in the Vatican. For a brief discussion on hair types see Exhibition catalogue, Auguste, Paris, 2014, pp. 70-72, and for a togate statue of the emperor with Pima Porta style hair, see p. 79, no. 35.

Born Gaius Octavius, the emperor Augustus was the son of a first generation Roman senator. On his mother's side, however, he was the great nephew of Julius Caesar, and he was promoted by the latter as a military commander at an early age. When Julius Caesar was famously assassinated on the Ides of March in 44 B.C., Octavian, as he was then known, was in the eastern Mediterranean preparing for an expedition. He returned immediately to Rome on hearing of his great-uncle's death, and learned on the return journey that he had been adopted as his son and heir.

Augustus Caesar, as he would become known, marked the turning point for a civilisation that was already an empire in all but name. Wracked by civil wars in the hundred years before Augustus' assumption of power, Rome would acquire under him a new stability. During his 45 year rule, Augustus organised a more effective administration and, although he was to take for himself the title of emperor, he was careful to cultivate an image of a hard-working and simple Pater Patriae - or Father of his Country.

By the time that Augustus became Emperor, the area known as modern day France had already been under Roman rule for a number of years - it was his great-uncle Julius Caesar who had conquered Northern Gaul in 58-51 B.C. Gaul was systematically Romanised: roads, aqueducts, baths, theatres and entire cities were built. Religion, deities, art and culture were all assimilated and classical sculpture celebrating Roman victories and the glorification of the emperor would have been widely displayed in public spaces. Once the prototype imperial portraits were created in Rome, they were copied in quantity all over the Empire. For another portrait of Augustus, found in Beziers in 1844 see no. 13 in Auguste, op. cit. p. 55.