Sculpture on Ancient Rome

A Freed Slave in Augustan Rome Paid to Have His Wrinkles Carved in Marble

Mon, 21 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The piece is small, about nine and a half inches high, and it is obviously a fragment. A man’s head and shoulders, carved in marble in the late first century BCE, broken out of something considerably larger. The Met’s curators identify what that something was: a funerary relief, the kind set into the outside wall of a family tomb, and they think the man was almost certainly a freedman.

His face is not flattered. The flesh sits heavy around the mouth, the brow is creased, the whole head has the blunt hard-worn quality that art historians call verism. He paid for that. Somebody in Rome, a generation or two out of slavery, commissioned a portrait and specifically did not ask to be made handsome.

The Met's Augustus Was Carved After He Died, and It Shows Him Half His Age

Mon, 21 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The head is over life-size, twelve inches on its own, and it broke away long ago from what was probably a seated statue of the emperor. The Met dates it to somewhere between 14 and 37 CE, which is the reign of Tiberius. Augustus was already dead when the sculptor started work. He had died in 14 CE at seventy-seven, after fifty-odd years at the centre of Roman public life, and the face on this marble belongs to a man around thirty.

Romulus, Remus, and the She-Wolf: How Rome Invented Its Own Origin

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

At Millesgården, the sculptor Carl Milles’s studio and museum on the island of Lidingö outside Stockholm, a copy of the Capitoline Wolf stands in the open air, green with patina, the two infants nursing beneath the she-wolf’s belly on a red granite plinth. Ivy climbs the wall behind it. A stone face — a garden ornament — watches from the wall above. The composition is so familiar as to have become almost invisible through repetition: the wolf alert, ears pricked, facing left with a wariness that has not relaxed in two thousand years of bronze casting; the twins below, pudgy and insistent, entirely unconcerned with the predator feeding them. The image is Rome’s founding symbol, its most exported icon, the picture that appeared on Roman coins in the second century BC and on Italian government documents in the twenty-first century AD. It has been in continuous circulation as a symbol of Roman identity for over two millennia, which is not an achievement many images can claim.