Child’s Play: Beauty for Roman Girls
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5617/acta.5753Abstract
This paper focuses on the representation of Roman girls in the visual arts of antiquity (portrait sculpture, reliefs on funerary altars, and the painted mummy portraits of Roman Egypt). Most of the portraits are funerary commemorations of maidens who died before their time and were memorialized in the form of portraits by their parents. Given the circumstances of childhood mortality and the timetable of funerary rituals, it is likely that the artists used conventional types to filter the deceased’s individual looks through standard formats or, better yet, to recast the girl as the woman she would have become by including more grown-up attributes. Finally, the paper turns to youthful ideals of beauty in the form of artifacts of material culture, the dolls with which the girls played at being grown-up.How to Cite
D’Ambra, E. (2017) “Child’s Play: Beauty for Roman Girls”, Acta ad archaeologiam et artium historiam pertinentia, 22(8 N.S.), pp. 15–36. doi: 10.5617/acta.5753.
Issue
Section
Articles
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgment of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).