One of my favorite academic titles of all time has long been Elizabeth Bartman’s ‘Hair and the Artifice of Roman Female Adornment’, referring to the ornate and often implausible hairstyles that women adopted when wishing to associate themselves with the ruling family.
And for the past year or so I’ve been intrigued, fascinated and repulsed by the so-called ‘MAGA-face’ sweeping a certain sector of the American president’s female acolytes. Today’s weird aesthetic homogenization that has been chosen by the women in (or aspiring to be in) Trump’s inner circle is quite something: long, barrel-curled tresses, blindingly white veneers, liberal maquillage, and often cartoonish use of cosmetic injectables…I won’t go on!
I’m showing the famous Fonseca bust here – she was clearly an elite in Metropolitan Rome. The glory of the marble carving makes that abundantly clear, with upstanding wreath of curls framing her face in a becoming way (and the turban of braids coiled behind is exquisite as well), rather than a cartoonish one.
Here the contemporary imperial style has been adopted with great success….the lofty pile of curls fared less well when tried out by older matrons or those farther down the socioeconomic food chain… (see story, etc). I’d say the same phenomenon is at work in the current regime: the good, bad, and absurd!
