CIRCA 2ND-3RD CENTURY A.D.

Victoria – the Roman personification of victory – is depicted alighting on an orb above a pedestal with her wings outstretched. She wears a wind-blown garment flowing in three tiers. Her center-parted wavy hair is fastened into a chignon at the nape of her neck and bound in a high top-knot above her forehead. In her lowered left hand she holds a palm frond; in her right she holds the remnants of another attribute, most probably a wreath.

For an earlier terracotta Nike alighting on an orb, from Tarentum, with similar flowing drapery but with her left leg and breast exposed, see no. 383 in U. Grote, “Nike,” LIMC, vol. VI. For a more modest Victoria carrying an elongated cornucopia, now in the Cleveland Museum of Art, see no. 66 A.P. Kozloff and D.G. Mitten, eds., The Gods Delight: The Human Figure in Classical Bronze. According to J.J. Herrmann (op cit., p. 343), the similarities between the Cleveland bronze and the Tarentine terracotta "may not be an unrelated coincidence; on his return to Rome in 28 B.C. after the battle of Actium, Augustus took a celebrated image of Victory from Tarentum and placed it in the Senate House in Rome." As such, all of these later versions "are probably to some degree derived from that transported figure."