The Getty Augustus - Really a Recarved Caligula?
William Storage and Laura Maish Work in progress
8/1/2008. Comments
welcome
Scholars point to the horizontal marks left by a claw chisel on Augustus's neck in the location where the locks of Caligula's shag hairstyle would have been removed. They also note that the Getty Augustus shows signs of trimming of Caligula's longer sideburns. Inspection of the piece confirms these surface conditions, but an anthropometric analysis seems strongly at odds with the conclusion that the Augustus head was recarved from a Caligula portrait.
An Augustus head could, of course, be recarved from one of Caligula by removing enough marble so that none of the original surfaces were retained. In this case the sculptor would have no constraints other than his artistic abilities and the Caligula head would look like any other carved from a block of marble. For the evidence of recarving described above to work, however, many points or surfaces of the original Caligula would still be visible in the current Augustus. For example, the neck, some parts of the coiffure, a portion of the forehead, the eyes, the nasal root and the ears, for example, have to be those of the original Caligula head. And therein lies the problem that makes us wonder whether this hypothesis can in fact be correct.
To test the hypothesis, we selected two ancient portraits of Caligula in good condition (from the Getty and Met) with original noses, and made detailed photos of sufficient detail and with appropriate photographic technique (e.g. that used to make measurements for craniofacial plastic surgery) to accurately identify facial landmarks and measure distances between them in the frontal and profile planes. In each case we used imaging software to distort the Caligula profiles so that the features that, according the recarving model, are preserved from the original Caligula would still coincide with those of the existing Augustus head.
In both cases the result is a head that does not look much like other portraits of Caligula; the distortions required to meet the conditions described above are quite severe. The Getty Caligula, for example (fig. 1, below), would require a large reduction of the head depth and a significant reduction in the distance from the ear canal to the orbital rim for the hypothetical original Caligula to have been reworked into the current Augustus. This hypothetical original would have a greater distance from the subnasion (deepest point on the nose bridge) to the orbital rim than that of the Getty Caligula. It would require a greater distance from bottom of nose to mouth (more precisely, subnasale - stomion) than that of the Getty Caligula. And surprisingly, given Caligula's reputation for "week chin", it would require that the hypothetical Caligula's neck to chin (larynx - pogonion) distance be smaller than that of the Getty Caligula. Stated differently, these existing portraits of Caligula have a larger chin than the ones that hypothetical Caligula heads would have had in order for them to be recarved into the Getty Augustus. Both the Augustus of Prima Porta (Vatican Brancho Nuovo) and the Augustus as Pontifex Maximus (Palazzo Massimo, fig. 4) have weaker chins than those of the Getty or Met Caligula heads. Thus the notion that an original Caligula's mouth had to be reshaped to correct a receding chin appears incorrect.
The required distortion of the Met Caligula to work with the recarving model slightly even more severe (fig. 2). The hypothetical original Caligula would require both the chin height and depth to be less than that of the Met Caligula, and the other needed distortions are similar to those of the Getty Caligula. This does not mean that Zanker and the other scholars are incorrect in their conclusion about the origin of the Getty Augustus, but it does cast some doubt and indicate that at least some of the evidence cited for the recarving is misapplied.
