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Following the conquest of Dacia (essentially modern-day Romania and Moldova) by Trajan (AD 53-117), the image of its inhabitants, shown as captives wearing their distinctive clothing, was introduced into public sculpture to symbolise the triumph of Rome. Works of this type, possibly including the present example, were installed in the forum built on the emperor’s orders.
In classical Antiquity the subjects of sculptures were identified by their attributes or gestures. In this case the figure’s pensive pose suggests that of one of the Muses, Polyhymnia or Clío, depicted in sarcophagus scenes as listening attentively to the god Apollo’s music. Based on late Hellenistic models, this figure was made in the Flavian period, possibly to decorate a library.
A brilliant orator and politician, Cicero (106-43 BC) became the literary reference for the values of Roman culture. This bust retains the original inscription with his name and age at his death in Roman numerals. The head is later and reproduces a well known model that was in the Mattei collection in Rome (now in London).
Originally in the collection of the 7th Marquis del Carpio, Spanish Ambassador in Rome (1676-82) and Viceroy of Naples (1682-87), this sculpture consists of a nude, Greco-Roman torso with some surviving folds of drapery, completed in the Baroque style by a Roman sculptor in the last quarter of the seventeenth century. It depicts Venus’s birth as she rises from the waves, supported by a dolphin and
The body is a Roman copy of a Hellenic original from around 270 B.C.E. which may represent a philosopher of the Epicurean school. The head is a Baroque copy of the type known as pseudo-Seneca. It is mentioned for the first time in the collection of Christine of Sweden, where it already appears as a restored effigy of Seneca, and it does not seem to have been altered in any noticeable manner since
