Relief Portrait Head of the Emperor Balbinus (c. 238 CE): Art, History and Details

Relief Portrait Head of the Emperor Balbinus (c. 238 CE) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

Wearing a laurel wreath, this head belongs to the little-known Emperor Balbinus, who ruled the empire together with Pupienus for only 99 days in AD 238, the now infamous Year of the Six Emperors. Following his death at the hands of an angry mob, Balbinus and his wife (whose name remains unknown) nevertheless received a large and impressive marble sarcophagus. The couple recline together on the lid, and appear twice in relief on the front, where this head originally belonged. Remarkably, although the head was purchased in Rome in 1925, two years before the sarcophagus was discovered (in many pieces near the Praetextatus Catacombs in Rome), it was found to fit a gap in the larger sculpture in 1966. Since then, a plaster cast of the Cleveland head has remained in place on the original sarcophagus, now in the Vatican Museums.

Object facts

• Title: Relief Portrait Head of the Emperor Balbinus
• Date: c. 238 CE
• Culture: Italy, Roman
• Type: Sculpture
• Technique: marble
• Dimensions: Overall: 18.5 cm (7 5/16 in.)
• Collection: GR - Roman
• Department: Greek and Roman Art
• Accession number: 1925.945

A detail from the museum

Carved in deep relief (not quite in the round), this head comes from a large sarcophagus.

Collection credit

Gift of J. H. Wade

Further reading listed by the museum

• Jucker, Hans, and John D. Cooney. "A Portrait Head of the Emperor Balbinus." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 54, no. 1 (1967): 11-16.
• Kleiner, Diana E. E. Roman Sculpture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.
• Vermeule, Cornelius C. Greek and Roman Sculpture in America: Masterpieces in Public Collections in the United States and Canada. Malibu, Calif: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 1981.

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.