Professional paper

The Full Face Portrait on Roman Coins

Domenico Duca orcid.org/0000-0002-9172-8384 ; Societas numismatica croatica, Societas numismatica Jadertina, Zadar, CRO

Abstract

From their beginnings Roman coins showed many figures of people, animals and plants. Among the countless portraits and their variants, Roman coins in all periods rarely showed full-face portraits. There appeared more often in Late Antiquity, especially in the Eastern Roman Empire after Constantine II. It is not completely clear why the profile portrait was more popular than the full-face portrait. The die makers are known to have been top master artists (at least at the peak of that civilisation) and were skilled enough to make any kind of portrait. A short survey of Roman portrait art shows that full-face portraits existed. It is not even necessary to consider the many portraits from the time of Constantine to Romulus Augustulus because at this time only the texts were changed, leaving the figures on the obverse and reverse of the coins the same, and the coin quality kept decreasing.

Keywords

Hrčak ID:

190256

URI

https://hrcak.srce.hr/190256

Publication date:

13.11.2013.

Article data in other languages: croatian

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