DESCRIPTION

Portrayed at about age fifteen, turned to his left, his face with slightly parted lips, upward-turned nose, wide-set eyes with finely incised irises and deep crescentic pupils, and prominent brow, the hair radiating from the crown in overlapping locks, falling in thick waves over the forehead, temples, and nape of the neck, and formerly crowned by a diadem.

CATALOGUE NOTE

Grandson of Antony and Cleopatra, Ptolemy of Mauretania was the last known descendant of the Ptolemaic dynasty. Born between 19 and 14 B.C. his mother was Cleopatra Selene and father Juba II, a native-born Mauretanian king. Ptolemy ruled jointly with his father after A.D. 21 and became sole ruler after his father’s death circa A.D. 23/24. As a client king of Rome he was first criticized for failing to assist Roman generals in their repeated attempts to quell the rebellion of Tacfarinas; Tacitus says of Ptolemy that his youth first made him “negligent” (incuriosus) of the affairs of the state (Annals, 4.23), but that his subsequent active military support won him Rome’s gratitude: “And now that this war had proved the zealous loyalty of Ptolemy, a custom of antiquity was revived, and one of the Senators was sent to present him with an ivory sceptre and an embroidered robe, gifts anciently bestowed by the Senate, and to confer on him the titles of king, ally, and friend (Annals 4.26).” This occurred in A.D. 24, shortly after the defeat and suicide of Tacfarinas.

About 16 years later Ptolemy’s visit to Rome, at the behest of Emperor Caligula, also involved a cloak. In 40 A.D., “after inviting Ptolemy to come [to Rome] from his kingdom, and receiving him with honor, [Caligula] suddenly had him executed for no other reason than that when giving a gladiatorial show, he noticed that Ptolemy on entering the theatre attracted general attention by the splendor of his purple cloak” (Suetonius, Caligula, 35; for a recent discussion of the primary sources see S.J.V. Malloch, “The death of Ptolemy of Mauretania,” Historia, vol. 53/1, 2004, pp. 38—45).

The identification of the sitter of the present bust as Ptolemy of Mauretania derives from his coinage (see Richter, Portraits of the Greeks, vol. III, no. 2013). With his sharp twist of the head, upward glance emphasized by the position of the irises, royal diadem, and bare shoulders, Ptolemy’s only known bronze portrait depicts him in the tradition of the Hellenistic princes of which he was to be the ultimate representative. Three other heads, all in marble and all from Cherchell in modern-day Algeria, reproduce the same youthful portrait type: an under-lifesize bust in the Louvre, almost identical to the present example (MA 1888: de Kersauson, op. cit, no. 57), an under-lifesize head almost unrecognizable due to its condition, also in the Louvre (MA 3183: Louvre, Portraits romains, no. 59), and a head in the Cherchell Museum (inv. no. 52: Chamoux, op. cit, figs. 1—3).

Together the four heads, including the present bronze, are based on a portrait type of the Crown Prince which, according to Klaus Fittschen, was created around A.D. 5, when Ptolemy was about fifteen years old and his likeness first appeared on the bronze coinage of Mauretania alongside that of his father Juba II (Horn and Rüger, op.cit., p.21). Fittschen argues that the type originated soon after and in close imitation to the one designed for Augustus’ son Gaius Caesar in A.D. 4 (compare, for example, the portrait bust of Gaius Caesar in the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, Geneva, illustrated by Chris Scarre, Chronicle of the Roman Emperors, London, 1995, p. 25). Similarities to Gaius’ in Ptolemy’s portrait include the treatment of the hair and the modeling of the facial features, which are not only generally Julio-Claudian in spirit but also specifically meant to evoke those of the legitimate heir to the Imperial throne. Ptolemy’s first portrait type is in itself a vivid illustration of Rome’s preferred foreign policy of ruling by proxy through client kings rather than by direct intervention and annexation, which was always more costly.

After the death of Juba II and Ptolemy’s accession to the throne of Mauretania, the latter’s second portrait type was presumably introduced, showing him as a diademed and bearded young man with fuller features and thicker more unruly hair (see Smith, op. cit., cat. no. 180, pl. 69,3—4, and Sotheby’s, New York, December 10th, 1999, no. 284).

The early provenance of the present bust is shrouded in mystery. Reportedly unearthed in the mid 19th Century in Stora Torget, Uppsala’s central square, it appears to have found its way to the shop of blacksmith who also sold scrap metal and old tools. It is there that Count Gustav Hamilton is said to have acquired the bust in the 1860s. Hamilton’s collection, primarily housed in his castle at Hedensberg, consisted of Nordic Neolithic stone axe-heads and various Bronze Age metalwork items such as fibulas, all of local origin (the collection is mentioned in Nordisk familjebok. Uggleupplagan, vol. 11, Stockholm, 1909, p. 190). Taken three years before his death, a 1911 photograph of Count Hamilton, shown lying in his bed and holding the bronze bust of young Ptolemy on the side-table, suggests how much he cherished it. The two lines of the Swedish family of Hamilton stem from Malcolm Hamilton of Dalserf, Archbishop of Cashell, Ireland, whose two sons Hugo and Ludvig entered Swedish service during the Thirty Years War; they were created barons in 1654.

How a Roman bust made in the early 1st Century A.D. and representing a North African king found its way to Sweden is open to speculation. That it came with Roman legionaries is unlikely since Roman incursions into this part of Scandinavia were very limited. Another possibility is that the bust was early Viking loot from Gaul or Britannia, as the gold or silver diadem that adorned the head must have looked worth taking to a looting party. Olof Vessberg (op. cit. p. 131) hypothesizes that “the bust may have come to Sweden with some Swedish traveler to Italy during the 18th Century,” in the wake of King Gustav III’s (1746—1792) Italian grand tour and the gathering of his extensive collection of ancient Roman sculpture, now housed in the Gustavus III Antiquities Museum in Stockholm (see Anne-Marie Leander Touati, Ancient Sculptures in the Royal Museum: the Eighteenth-century Collection, Stockholm, 1998). But the Swedish tradition of collecting antiquities began even earlier, in the late 17th Century, when Queen Christina moved to Rome after her abdication and started amassing a collection of marbles on a grand scale. Among Christina’s most prized possessions was a Roman bronze head of an athlete in which she saw a portrait of the young Alexander the Great (see Veronica Buckley, Christina Queen of Sweden: The Restless Life of a European eccentric, New York, 2004, chapter “Glory Days”). It is now in the Prado Museum in Madrid, together with most of her other antiquities.