Iconography and Archaeology
This chapter critically examines how scholars have interpreted Roman portraits of the third century ce. It focuses on two case studies. The first is a famous portrait of Maximinus Thrax from the Albani collection and now in the Capitoline Museum. Read through the lens of late antique literary sources, the portrait has been seen by art historians as portraying Maximinus’ ferocity, physical strength, and low class, barbarian origins. The second case study is a far less well-known pair of portraits excavated at the Roman villa of Lullingstone, south of London, which became the object of a highly unusual domestic cult in late antiquity. These case studies are used to argue that the heavy reliance on iconography and literary sources required to interpret portraits lacking archaeological context is less reliable and less informative than interpretations derived from a combination of iconography and archaeology.