Female portrait bust

Female portrait bust

Date
Late 2nd century AD
Dimensions
Height: 130mm
Width: 50mm
Medium
Terracotta
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Bust of a woman with the disproportionately large head placed on the profiled base. Her costume is a transparent robe decorated with a wreath of small flowers. She wears the so-called melon hairstyle fashionable at the time of Faustina the Younger, wife of Marcus Aurelius, consisting of wavy strands framed at the back in a flat bun, tied with a ribbon. The dating of the figurine is confirmed by the teardrop-shaped earrings typical of the period, as well as the way the large eyes were modelled with large pupils placed in the upper part of the eyeball. The custom of placing portrait busts of the dead in graves was characteristic for the western part of the empire between the 1st and 3rd centuries. In Egypt, on the other hand, only three examples of similar figurines are known.

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