Portrait Bust of a Man (27 BCE–14 CE): Art, History and Details

Portrait Bust of a Man (27 BCE–14 CE) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

The realistic features of this fine life-sized portrait include wrinkles in the forehead and beside each eye, and very naturalistic ears, protruding but not quite symmetrical. The stylized hair is neatly arranged and suggests a date in the Augustan period, although some scholars have seen it as late Republican. Likely once topping a shaft as a herm bust, the portrait’s subject—now unknown—would have been identified by an inscription.

Object facts

• Title: Portrait Bust of a Man
• Date: 27 BCE–14 CE
• Culture: Italy, Roman, Augustan period
• Type: Sculpture
• Technique: bronze
• Dimensions: Overall: 38.1 x 21.6 cm (15 x 8 1/2 in.)
• Collection: GR - Roman
• Department: Greek and Roman Art
• Accession number: 1928.860

A detail from the museum

This portrait originally had inlaid eyes, probably in stone, glass, or ivory.

Collection credit

Gift of the John Huntington Art and Polytechnic Trust

Further reading listed by the museum

• Howard, Rossiter. "Roman Portrait Head." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 15, no. 7 (1928): 147-53.
• Magoffin, R. V. D. Magic Spades ; the Romance of Archaeology. New York: Henry Holt, 1929.
• Bieber, Margarete. “Roman Sculpture in the Cleveland Museum.” Art in America 32 (April 1944): 65–83.

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.