Conceiving the Roman Portrait Image

Today, social media attest to a fascination with creating portrayals of those around us, but this impulse for capturing likenesses is not new. Cultures around the globe have for millennia responded to the same enduring drive to represent friends, family, and strangers, and the ancient Roman approaches to portraiture constituted a central segment of their impressive artistic legacy. Most scholarly assessments of Roman portraits have centered on establishing identities and typologies for imperial representations and on related stylistic developments in private likenesses. My paper advances the discourse on Roman portraiture by returning to a question even more fundamental than the identity of the portrait sitter: how did the Romans conceptualize the portrait image? Specifically, I will investigate three facets of Roman portraits: the role that absence and desire play in conceiving of the ancient portrait, the dynamic between portraiture and mimesis, and the mechanics of Roman portraiture. I argue that pothos, the yearning desire for that which is absent, is crucial to understanding how people in antiquity theorized the portrait image and results in a genre intimately linked with the ancient art of memory. I also contend that the choice of whether or not mimesis is invoked acts as the vehicle for expressing the language through which Roman portraiture operates. By closely examining rhetorical treatises, philosophical writings, and other primary source material in conjunction with the visual record, this paper reveals little-explored connections between portraiture and pothos.