Child’s Play: Beauty for Roman Girls

Abstract

This paper focuses on the representation of Roman girls in the visual arts of antiquity (portrait sculpture, reliefs on funerary altars, and the painted mummy portraits of Roman Egypt). Most of the portraits are funerary commemorations of maidens who died before their time and were memorialized in the form of portraits by their parents. Given the circumstances of childhood mortality and the timetable of funerary rituals, it is likely that the artists used conventional types to filter the deceased’s individual looks through standard formats or, better yet, to recast the girl as the woman she would have become by including more grown-up attributes. Finally, the paper turns to youthful ideals of beauty in the form of artifacts of material culture, the dolls with which the girls played at being grown-up.