Plaited, twined, and knotted to pool over her brow, this young woman’s hairstyle is one of the most elaborate of the increasingly far-fetched hairy confections of the Roman Empire.
Her identity is not known and that prim expression gives little away, but the quality of the carving sees to indicate she was from an aristocratic family (perhaps a local Athenian one) during the Hadrianic period. It was that great philhellene’s wife the Empress Sabina who popularized the ‘turban’ coiffure, which is rendered to such great effect here.
Sheer abundance of hair and its creative display was a preoccupation among Roman female elite – a way to demonstrate taste and a cultivated sort of fertility, while requiring at least one skilled servant and a pretty plush life of leisure to pull off. The extent to which added hairpieces, extensions, and buttressing devices were used is a matter of some debate (check out Elizabeth Bartman’s delectable ‘Hair and the Artifice of Roman Female Adornment’). Here, the woman’s youth and the sculptor’s skill conspire to make this unlikely hairdo vaguely plausible, and maybe even downright attractive!
