The Appearance of Statues

Abstract There are, no doubt, good psychological reasons why the head should have received individual attention in most artistic traditions, but from one perspective it is strange that the representation of people should so often have been achieved by this kind of visual synecdoche.1 It has sometimes been suggested that the concentration on the head in ancient portraiture—an emphasis inherited by modern Western art—was a particularly Roman or Italian characteristic, whereas the Greek artistic tradition made use of the entire human body for the representation of the individual. Less effort is now devoted to identifying the distinctive characteristics of Roman art in this manner, and as Richter acknowledges, isolated heads, and specifically the ‘bust form’, are products of the Greek world. Portrait busts or heads are attested in the Hellenistic period, though we tend to associate them with Rome. Nevertheless, it is clear that portrait heads have a specially prominent place not only amidst extant Roman sculpture but in the conceptions of individual identity expressed in Roman literary sources.