A Rediscovered Statue of a Julio-Claudian Princess in the Hispanic Society of America

Abstract

In 1905, Archer Milton Huntington purchased a full-figure sculpture of a Julio-Claudian princess for the museum which he was founding, The Hispanic Society of America. He, however, chose only to exhibit the readily appreciable head, leaving the body, unpublished, in the storerooms. Examination of the entire figure underscores two important characteristics of the production of sculpture from that period. First, sculptors carved the bodies of members of the imperial family with the same attention to models as they carved the heads. Second, this work was made in transportable pieces just as those excavated from other Julio-Claudian cycles. These examples suggest that designated workshops created similar imperial statue groups and that artists travelled with prefabricated pieces.