The Vestal Virgins and their imperial patrons: Sculptures and inscriptions from the Atrium Vestae in the Roman Forum.

Abstract

This study concerns the marble portrait statues and busts of the Vestal Virgins, Roman priestesses who served Vesta, the Roman goddess of the hearth. Vesta in turn protected the life-giving fire within every home and, by extension the Roman state. In antiquity, portrait statues of the Vestals were displayed in the colonnaded courtyard of the Atrium Vestae, the residence of the Vestals in the Roman Forum. Emulation of imperial physiognomy serves as a new method to substantiate the dates for each Vestal portrait and as a basis for new theories about the increasingly strong relations between Vestals and imperial women in the second century A.D. This study offers original interpretations of the statue types used by Vestals and empresses in the Atrium. I identify two previously unnamed types: the Priestess Burning Incense and the Empress as Juno. I have determined that in the Antonine period, two other statues types, the Fortuna and Peplophoros, were used only by Vestals and imperial women. The Catalog appended to this thesis adds two sculptures to the corpus of known Vestal portrait heads and statues, includes the previously uncataloged headless statues from the Atrium, and identifies which ones depicted Vestal Virgins and which depicted empresses. Careful examination and measurement of all the extant Vestal portraits sculptures excavated in the Atrium Vestae provide clues to answering questions concerning who commissioned the portraits, who made them, why and when were they made, where and when were they displayed, and what was their fate after the demise of paganism. A major change in the architecture of the Atrium Vestae, when Trajan (98-117) rebuilt the house of the Vestals, provided appropriate places for the display of the Vestal statues. An important finding of this thesis is that the earliest surviving Vestal portraits coincide in date with the newly built peristyle court. The exedra of the eastern wing is proposed as the locus where guilds, individuals honored the emperor and his family with portrait busts and inscriptions. The original, unpublished manuscript of Lanciani's 1882-83 excavations of the Atrium Vestae as well as his notebooks have furnished information concerning the identity and approximate find-spot of each object, Vestal or non-Vestal. The excavation records and architectural history of the Atrium Vestae permit reconstruction of the way it was embellished in antiquity. This thesis integrates for the first time the Vestal and imperial sculptures and inscriptions that were found and presumably displayed at the same site.