This portrait at Boston’s MFA is one of the finest and most challenging I’ve come across, and I somewhat doubt that a pithy caption will do it justice…
It is a most handsome face, with high cheekbones cheekbones, squared jaw, and pouty chin. The full lips are very slightly parted as if in mid-exhale, and the eyes have the heart-shaped pupils and heavy lidded somnolence of the Antonine period beneath feathery brows. A pretty significant intervention took place some years later, with much of the cranium chiselled off above mid-forehead and ears and right down to the nape with a central, imposing ridge (mohawk-like…) was left behind.
Determining what imposing vestige might have been chiselled off is the key to understanding the portraits original identity. A big coiffure fashionable among ladies of the Antonine court (check out portraits of Faustian the Younger) is one possibility that has been floated. But those smoothed contours remaining over the ears and the nape are suspiciously reminiscent of a helmet lining, and the ridge perhaps part of a serious Corinthian helmet. The centrally parted hair left over the brow is overtly feminine and must have peeped out beneath its visor. And this female helmet-wearer must have been Minerva.
As part of the secondary remodelling, wispy facial hair has been incised over the lip and descending from temples to jowls. The goddess has become a young dandy, and that vestigial mohawk perhaps the infrastructure to support a new manly cap of curls.
