Portrait of Livia

Rome, found during construction work in the Tiber river-bed. The left eyebrow is cracked; plaster additions complete the nose, chin and neck. White marble. Ht. 30.5 cm; inv. 572.

Portrait of a young lady with a broad, vaguely triangular face, large almond-shaped eyes and thin lips. Her hair, characterized by a high frontal nodus, is gathered into a thin central braid on the top of the head descending to a chignon on the back of the neck, and pulled back on the sides in wavy masses which finish in the nape area in a sort of rope arrangement. The physical features, such as the large, deeply expressive eyes and the determined chin—and, especially, the hairstyle with the high frontal nodus—permit us to identify the figure as Livia, mother of the future emperor Tiberius and wife of Octavian, who was posthumously adopted by her husband with the name of Iulia Augusta. This particular hairstyle, the "Nodus type," was introduced to Rome by Octavia, the sister of Augustus (and first documented by an aureus of the period of the triumvirates), and represented, by its relative austerity and simplicity, a conservative reaction against the elaborate Hellenistic hairstyles flaunted by Roman ladies in the Republican period. Livia was portrayed in four different model types with this hairstyle, an expression of the new Roman matron, casta and univira. The Tiber portrait belongs to the type whose reference point is Statue no. 615 in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptothek in Copenhagen, which came from Fayum and probably dates from the last two decades of the first century BC.