PORTRAIT. — I. ARCHAEOLOGY
The portrait was a characteristic feature of Roman art. Christians did not have portraits of the Saviour or of the Blessed Virgin; among the Apostles, only Peter (q.v.), Paul (q.v.), and Andrew (q.v.) were depicted with typical somatic features.
In the rapidly executed funerary paintings, true portraits are not encountered; in the Catacomb of Domitilla there is a bust in a kind of triptych (Wilpert, Pitture, pl. 134). In the Catacomb of Callisto, the owner of a cubiculum had her face fixed on canvas in the vault above the entrance, while the bust was painted in fresco (ibid., pl. 134, 1). In the same catacomb there is a true portrait, that of the deceased Dionysias in the cubiculum known as the "Cubiculum of the Five Saints" (ibid., pl. 111). Some portraits are found in certain funerary frescoes of Naples (H. Achelis, Die Katakomben von Neapel, Leipzig 1936, passim) and in some gold-glass medallions, such as the one from Brescia (q.v.), and another in the Museo Sacro of the Vatican Library (W. De Grüneisen, Le portrait, Rome 1911, p. 76, figs. 87–88). A fine portrait is that of the deceased Turura in widow’s garb, in Commodilla of the 7th century (B. Bagatti, Il cimitero di Commodilla, Vatican City 1936, p. 109, fig. 96). Some saints are depicted quite early, such as St Agnes as a young girl, according to the texts (q.V. AGNESE, fig., vol. I, cols. 468); St Ambrose (q.V. fig., vol. I, cols. 985) and St Augustine (G. Wilpert, Il più antico ritratto di S. Agostino, in Misc. Agostiniana, II, Rome 1931, pp. 1–3; q.V. AGOSTINO, fig., vol. I, pl. 39). While the others appear as ideal types, such as those of the saints represented in the funerary frescoes—Cecilia, Sebastian, Quirinus and Policarpus, Sixtus II, Cornelius, Cyprian and Optatus in Callisto; Marcellinus, Peter, Tiburtius and Gorgonius in the catacomb “inter duas lauros”; Abdon, Sennen, Pollio, Pimenius and Milix in Ponziano; Simplicius, Faustinus in Generosa; the SS. Felix, Adauctus, Merita, Stephen and Luke in Commodilla; Sixtus, Callistus, Lawrence, Hippolytus in gold-glass medallions, etc.
A certain number of truly artistic portraits are those offered by some mummy covers from Fayyum (G. Wilpert, La nimbe carré, in Mélanges d'archéologie et d'histoire, 26 [1906]; W. De Grüneisen, Le portrait, Rome 1911, passim). More refined and artistic are the portraits of the deceased on Christian sarcophagi, where Roman models continue in use, either with the type of the “imago clipeata” in the center of the sarcophagus, or where the bust of one or more deceased—often a married couple—is carved on a circular surface connected like a clipeus, or this image is carved as if enclosed in a shell valve. Another style, also of Roman tradition, is that of the deceased represented in bust or standing, often holding the volume of the “lex christiana,” against a background of drapery or curtain distinguished by the names parape-lasma, antipendium, cortina, velum, to which a symbolic value has sometimes been attributed, though it seems more likely to be a mere ornament (G. Bovini, I sarcofagi paleocristiani. Determinazione della loro cronologia mediante l'analisi dei ritratti, Vatican City 1949).