Portraits of rulers
To the ruling elite, portraiture has always had an important function. These individuals were fallible human beings with bodies that aged and died like any others. But they also held highly visible public roles, and, according to ancient ideas of rule, the physical body of the ruler was symbolically overwhelmed by the powerful nature of [...]
The Material of Roman Portraits- Gold, gilding, silver and ivory
The brilliance of gold, its intrinsic value and connotations of immortality, made gold, and to a certain extent silver a treasured material for portraiture. Literary sources inform us that different emperors rejected the erection of their images in gold because it implied divine honours. In his Res Gestae Augustus records that he had 80 statues [...]
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