Methodological Approaches to the Dating and Identification of Roman Portraits

Abstract

To date, approximately 25–30,000 portraits from the Roman Empire have been discovered, which were created during the 350-year period from the late Republic to the end of the third century CE. Initially, starting in the early Renaissance, it was collectors, enthusiasts, and dilettantes who were primarily concerned with Roman portraits. Since the end of the nineteenth century, the topic has been taken up by academic scholarship, and the study of portraits has developed into a subdiscipline of archaeological research. As part of that process, specific methods were developed and continuously refined, which are described in this chapter. In many portraits of emperors, starting already with those of Augustus, Trajan and Hadrian, motifs of different portrait types were evidently combined with one another. The portrait types that were created at the start of an emperor's reign and appear on the earliest coins can be considered as conclusively dated.

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