Portrait Bust of a Girl (c. 250–75 CE): Art, History and Details

Portrait Bust of a Girl (c. 250–75 CE) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

This portrait bust depicts a young child, perhaps three or four years old, with soft, fleshy cheeks and delicate features. The neck is slight, the skull relatively large and round, with closely cropped hair indicated by fine incisions. Although this hairstyle may appear masculine today, the child wears a high-belted chiton, a long garment usually worn by women and girls. Together with the rope running diagonally across the chest, this suggests a female funerary portrait, perhaps showing the deceased in the guise of the huntress Diana.

Object facts

• Title: Portrait Bust of a Girl
• Date: c. 250–75 CE
• Culture: Italy, Roman
• Type: Sculpture
• Technique: marble
• Dimensions: Overall: 52.1 cm (20 1/2 in.)
• Collection: GR - Roman
• Department: Greek and Roman Art
• Accession number: 1951.288

A detail from the museum

This portrait of a young girl was thought for many years to represent a boy.

Collection credit

Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Wunderlich, Silvia A. "A Roman Portrait Bust of a Child." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 38, no. 9 (1951): 219-23.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. The Cleveland Museum of Art Handbook. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1958.
• Carter, Martha L. Classical Art. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1961.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.