Object Description
Italian, 19th century, After the Antique
Bust of Fulvia Plautilla
Marble, on an ebonised wood base
48.5 cm. / 19 ins high (the marble), 59.5 cm. / 23 ½ ins overall
This marble bust of a young Roman female is after the antique portrait in the Uffizi, Florence, presumed to depict Plautilla (d. 212 AD), tragic wife of the emperor Caracalla (188-217 AD).
This marriage, which took place at a lavish ceremony in 202 AD, proved an unhappy one, since Caracalla hated Plautilla’s father, Plautianus In 205, Plautianus was murdered during a plot orchestrated by Caracalla, who forced Plautilla and her brother into exile to the island of Lipari, near Sicily. Following the death of Septimius in 211 and Caracalla’s brutal execution of his brother and co-emperor, Geta, in 212 Plautilla was also put to death on her husband’s orders.
The present bust is modelled after the Plautilla in the Uffizi Gallery (inv. no. 1914, n. 218), which was in the collections of the Medici Grand Dukes in Florence since at least the early eighteenth century. In the Uffizi bust, as in the present example, the young empress is shown glancing to dexter in an alert, graceful manner. She wears an elaborate “melon” hairstyle, consisting of a number of long, curling braids, tied at the back in a bun of smaller braids running in a zig-zag pattern. Although the bust’s plate reads ‘Plautilla’, recent scholarship has suggested that this could be the work of a restorer and that the bust may be a portrait of another aristocratic young Severan lady, shown in the guise of the empress.
During the eighteenth century, marble and bronze replicas of the Plautilla were frequently copied and often twinned with another ancient portrait in the Uffizi of Plautilla’s brother-in-law, Geta, as a boy. Sculptures of this tragic pair of young Romans cut short in their prime, both victims of the brutal Caracalla, would have appealed to the Grand Tour taste for dramatic figures from Roman history.
The present bust exhibits good attention-to-detail in the carving of the “melon” hairstyle and crumpled folds of drapery. Judging by the rough-hewn carving at the back, it is likely to have been executed in the first half of the nineteenth century, probably in Florence or nearby Carrara. A comparable replica dated to the eighteenth century, also with uncut eyes, was offered at Sotheby’s in 2019 (Sotheby’s, London, 3rd December 2019, lot 72).