Severan Tondo

• 1. Introduction

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  The Severan Tondo has a face-shaped absence where a portrait used to be. The painting is a circular wooden panel, 30.5 centimeters wide. It depicts the Roman emperor Septimius Severus with his wife Julia Domna and their two sons in imperial regalia. One son's face has been removed. The panel now sits in the Altes Museum in Berlin.

  In December of 211 AD, Caracalla had his brother Geta killed. What followed was one of the most sweeping acts of official erasure the Roman world had ever attempted. Every image of Geta and every inscription bearing his name became a target for destruction across the entire empire.

  Geta's absent face opens a series of questions. Why did someone destroy part of this portrait, and who carried it out? Who made this painting, and in what workshop? And how does one wooden disc from ancient Rome survive when almost nothing like it has come down to us?

• 2. A Family in Gold

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  Julia Domna's hair in the tondo is crimped into parallel locks, a style associated with her origins in Syria. This may represent a wig. Julia Domna is commonly credited with introducing wig-wearing into Roman society, though evidence points to a predecessor first establishing the practice in portraiture.

  All four figures wear wreaths embellished with elaborate jewels. White robes trimmed with gold complete the regalia, and the male figures hold sceptres. The upper portions of those sceptres are missing; they once carried imperial symbols. The tondo was most likely cut from a square or rectangular original, with the trimming accounting for those lost tops.

  Septimius Severus stands to the viewer's right, with Julia Domna to the left and the two boys in front of them. Although Julia Domna appears notably paler than Severus in the portrait, this reflects artistic convention rather than actual complexion. Artists of the era routinely depicted women with fairer skin and men with darker skin. Severus appears without the visible signs of aging that his official portraits began to show in 202. That absence becomes one of the key pieces of evidence for dating the panel.

• 3. The Road to Power

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  Septimius Severus was born in 145 AD in Lepcis Magna, a city in the coastal region of Tripolitania in what is now Libya. He advanced through the Roman Senate during the reign of Marcus Aurelius, reaching real influence by 190. Among the governorships he held along the way were Gallia Lugdunensis, Upper Pannonia, and Sicily.

  The murder of the emperor Commodus in 192 opened a window of crisis that Severus moved quickly to exploit. He seized power with his troops in 193, then spent the following four years eliminating rivals. By 197, the empire rested in his sole authority. His most celebrated campaigns were directed against the Parthians.

  Severus died in February of 211, intending joint rule by his two sons. That arrangement did not hold, and within months it had collapsed. Caracalla ruled alone until his own death in 217. The dynasty continued through further instability before ending in 235. That span of forty-two years saw damnatio memoriae used against a striking number of people. Those targeted included Didius Julianus, Plautilla, Clodius Albinus, Elagabalus, Julia Soemias, and Pescennius Niger.

• 4. Pinning Down the Date

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  Geta became Caesar in 198, and both sons appear wearing crowns in the tondo. That gives scholars their earliest possible date for the painting. Severus's official portraiture began to display signs of aging in 202, and the tondo shows none, setting that as the latest credible year.

  Caracalla was born in 188 and appears in the panel as a youth. Around 205, a more mature portrait style was introduced for him. The tondo depicts him before that transition, confirming a date before about 205.

  The corkscrew locks visible on the upper portion of Severus's forehead have prompted their own debate. If authentic, they link the painting to the Serapis portrait type, which combined the emperor's likeness with that of Serapis, a Greco-Egyptian deity. Most scholars place the beginning of that style in 204. Some therefore date the tondo to 202 or 203. But the balance of evidence suggests the painting came before that style as a precursor rather than a product. Coin evidence and portrait style analysis together now place the tondo's creation between 199 and 200 AD.

• 5. Official Forgetting

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  After Geta's death, the Senate issued a formal declaration of damnatio memoriae against him, in approximately 212 AD. This required the erasure of his name and image from every available surface throughout the Roman Empire. Ancient sources describe the physical acts this involved: smearing mud, offal, paint, and even excrement over images.

  Approximately thirty-one percent of inscriptions pertaining to Geta were left untouched. That figure implies a highly organized campaign. Scholars believe the Roman army may have been instrumental in carrying it out. Geta's face was erased from coins, monuments, and private portraits alike.

  The tondo may have belonged to a private individual who displayed it as a demonstration of loyalty to the ruling dynasty. Owning such a portrait was an act of pietas, a formal expression of devotion to the emperor. By erasing Geta's face, the owner could continue to display loyalty to Caracalla. The legacy of Septimius Severus and Julia Domna remained intact in the portrait.

  Geta's is the face most scholars identify as the one removed. But the younger of the two boys might be Geta, in which case it is Caracalla's face that was destroyed. Under that interpretation, someone used the portrait to express private retaliation for Caracalla's mass execution of young Alexandrian men in 215.

  Unlike Geta, Caracalla escaped official damnatio memoriae after his own murder in 217, because he was well liked by the soldiers. The Senate labeled him a tyrant. The new emperor Macrinus removed some of Caracalla's images from public display without issuing a formal condemnation.

• 6. An Egyptian Workshop

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  Septimius Severus visited Egypt in 199, following military victories against the Parthian Empire the year before. One well-supported theory holds that the Severan Tondo was painted to mark that visit, before Severus's campaigns in North Africa in 203. The Fayum district of Egypt, which produced this style of portrait, provides the most plausible location for its creation.

  The Severan Tondo is painted in tempera on a wooden panel, precisely the technique used in Fayum mummy portraiture. The Greek four-color palette of white, red, yellow, and black appears in both the tondo and in Fayum work. A single light source illuminates the figures in the same manner. Jewelry and wreaths function as markers of cultural identity and religious practice in Fayum portraits, just as they do here.

  The artist who made the Severan Tondo may have been primarily employed as a Fayum mummy portrait painter. That background would explain the depth of the stylistic overlap. The Fayum district was home to a mixed population of Egyptian, Greek, and Roman inhabitants. Portraits produced there served the upper-middle-class Roman Egyptian community, and the Severan Tondo fits within that milieu.

  Some Fayum portraits were made for burial contexts; others were painted for the living world of display. The Severan Tondo belonged to that second category, painted for living display rather than burial. That fact raises the question of how it was used and how this one wooden panel has survived.

• 7. Only Survivor

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  Imperial portraits were mass-produced for offices and public buildings throughout the Roman Empire. Roman law required that certain official documents be signed in the presence of an emperor's image. This gave the signed document the same legal weight as if executed before the emperor himself. Each change of emperor meant the old portrait was discarded or replaced.

  The Severan Tondo is, as far as scholars know, the only surviving specimen of this type of imperial panel painting. Wood is an organic material that does not normally survive two millennia in recoverable condition. Such portraits once filled offices and public buildings across the empire; none of the rest have come down to us.

  The Antikensammlung Berlin acquired the tondo in 1932 from a dealer in Paris. Nothing is known of its history between its creation in Roman Egypt and that Parisian sale. It had passed through the antiquities trade at some unknown point before reaching Berlin. Inventory number 31329 is the sole identifier of the only Roman imperial panel painting known to have survived two thousand years.