The honor of a public image was sometimes extended to Romans outside the imperial circle who distinguished themselves through public service or military success. This head of a now-anonymous man once belonged to a life-size bronze statue, one of the costliest types of honorific monument. Sunken eyes, a lined face, and a furrowed brow lend the portrait an air of mature gravity. The combination of short, thick, and curly hair with a closely cropped beard dates the work to the early third century A.D., when this style of grooming was in fashion. The incision of fine details, such as the strands of the eyebrows and the irises and pupils in the eyes, had long been a regular feature of large-scale portraits in bronze, though by this time the practice had spread to marble statuary as well.

This head is reported to have been found in 1878 in Rome, in a stretch of the Tiber River spanned today by the Ponte Sisto, a Renaissance bridge. Along with the head were recovered several other bronze statue parts, some architectural fragments, and an inscription recording the dedication of an arch to Valentinian I and Valens, brothers and co-emperors (reigned A.D. 364-75), around A.D. 367; the arch would have marked the entrance to an ancient bridge on the spot. A toga-clad statue incorporating this bronze head may have been reused more than a century after its creation as part of the arch's decorative program; the integration of recycled sculpture into new monuments was a common phenomenon, especially in late antiquity. The dent in the left side of the head and the irregular break at the neck may indicate that the arch was destroyed-perhaps in the eighth century, when the swollen river is thought to have inundated the bridge.

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