Altes Museum on Ancient Rome

Damnatio Memoriae: Rome's War on Memory

Tue, 05 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In the Altes Museum in Berlin there is a circular painted panel, tempera on wood, roughly 30 centimeters in diameter, made in Egypt around 200 AD. It shows a Roman imperial family in full regalia: a bearded emperor in the upper right wearing the jeweled diadem of the Severan dynasty; his wife beside him on the upper left, dark-eyed and elaborately coiffed; a young man below them in the center wearing his own smaller diadem. A fourth face occupies the lower left — or rather, a fourth face should occupy it. What is there instead is bare wood, scratched down to nothing by something sharp, the ghost of a face removed with deliberate force at some point after the panel was painted. The family portrait has three people in it. It was made to have four.

Faustina the Younger: The Woman Behind the Philosopher Emperor

Tue, 05 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The bust in the Altes Museum in Berlin is one of the more technically striking Roman portrait pieces in any German collection. The head is Carrara marble — white, fine-grained, the standard material for imperial portraiture — but the drapery is carved from a deeply veined breccia, red and brown and amber in layered striations that catch the light differently at every angle. The polychrome combination, fashionable in later reworkings of ancient busts, gives the portrait an unusual visual richness: the cool classical face above the warm geological drama of the clothing. The label identifies her plainly. Kaiserin Faustina die Jüngere. Empress Faustina the Younger. Wife of Marcus Aurelius. Marble, 141–175 AD.

Julius Caesar Was Not an Emperor

Tue, 05 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Altes Museum in Berlin holds a bust of Julius Caesar in Egyptian graywacke — a stone that gives it the distinctive cold gray-green color that earned it its museum nickname, the Grüner Caesar, the Green Caesar. It was acquired in Paris in 1787, carved sometime between 1 and 30 AD, and it is posthumous: made after Caesar’s death, showing him in a toga as a statesman rather than as a general or dictator, classically idealized in the manner of early imperial portraiture. The eye inlays are modern restorations. The shadow it casts on the red wall behind it is an accident of museum lighting that happens to be accurate — Caesar and his shadow, the man and the myth that outlasted him by two thousand years and counting.

Myth on Marble: The Roman Sarcophagus

Tue, 05 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Medea Sarcophagus in Berlin’s Altes Museum is 227 centimeters long and 65 centimeters high, carved from white marble in Rome around 140–150 AD, found near the Porta San Lorenzo on the city’s eastern edge. It is one of the finest examples of Roman mythological sarcophagus relief in any collection, and it depicts, in four continuous scenes reading left to right, the story of a woman who poisoned her rival, murdered her own children, and escaped in a dragon-drawn chariot to avoid the consequences. This is what a wealthy Roman family chose to carve on the box that would hold someone’s bones. The choice is not self-evidently logical. Making sense of it requires understanding something about how Rome thought about death that is not immediately obvious from the surface of the stone.

The Fayum Portraits: Faces from the Edge of the Roman World

Tue, 05 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In a case in the Altes Museum in Berlin, ten painted wooden panels are arranged across two shelves: five on the upper row, five below. They show men, women, and children. The youngest is perhaps eight or nine years old. The oldest appears to be in his fifties, though age is difficult to assess with confidence from encaustic wax portraits of the first through third centuries AD. What is not difficult to assess is the gaze. Every one of these faces looks directly out of the panel, directly at whoever is standing in front of the case, with the same frontal directness. They were painted to look at you. Eighteen centuries later they still do, and the effect has not diminished.

The Roman Domus: How the Wealthy Lived

Tue, 05 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A museum case in Berlin’s Altes Museum holds a collection of Roman domestic bronzes from Rome and Pompeii, first through fourth century AD, under a label that states its subject with admirable directness: Luxury in the Roman house. The contents repay attention. Two griffins — mythological hybrids of eagle and lion, rendered with precise musculature — served as the decorative supports of a folding table, their bodies forming the legs, their wings providing the lateral bracing. A satyr and nymph group, extravagantly detailed, formed the foot of a large bronze vessel. Small bronze ducks and swans — the fulcra — decorated the scroll-ends of couches and dining beds, the curved terminals that distinguished a proper Roman reclining couch from mere functional furniture. Two portrait busts on red marble pedestals completed the ensemble. None of this was structural. All of it was mandatory, in the sense that a wealthy Roman household without this level of decorative investment was announcing, inadvertently, that its owner could not afford it.