\paperw19995 \margr0\margl0 \plain \fs20 \f1 The portrait was one of the most interesting aspects of Roman art, even in the republican period. The custom of keeping bust
s of ancestors had deep roots in Italic culture. Their function was to protect the house and serve as an admonition for the young. The tradition of this type of representation acted as a stimulus for the emergence of a realistic type of portrait in Roman
art, which characterized the development of the Roman style from the beginning. Such portraits were a reflection of the vigorous stock of the patrician class that had created the state of Rome. If republican art was a mirror of that society, the advent
of the empire also entailed changes in the language of art. From the reign of Augustus onward, art was called on to express the role and superiority of the \i princeps\i0 . This was the first purely Roman artistic language, not only because it was linked
to officialdom, but also because it was the first unitary style to emerge. Augustus oriented his cultural program toward the revival of Greek art, with the aim of creating a perfect style. His successors progressively turned away from Greek models to de
velop a language linked to power, whose function was to serve as a vehicle for propaganda and to glorify that very power. For this reason, the typical forms of imperial art were those connected with the exaltation of the figure of the emperor, the living
symbol of the greatness of the empire and, after his death, an object of a genuine cult. The most typical forms adopted by this glorification were the figure of the emperor in armor, the statue of the emperor on horseback and the portrait bust. The latt
er were considered a visible symbol of the strength of the empire and of a civil organization that the emperor took as a model for the ennoblement of his own authority. It was only under Vespasian, the first emperor of the Flavian dynasty, that changes w
ere introduced into the typology of the portrait and into the distinction between public and private portraits. A further shift took place under Hadrian, with the return to Greek motifs as an expression of the emperorÆs pro-Hellenic sympathies. His succe
ssors also proposed a return to classical culture, that was linked to a subtle vein of irrationality that was to characterize the crisis in Roman art. In those years, Greek rationalism gave way to mystical tendencies and mystery cults that found expressi
on in soft forms, a quest for coloristic effects and a delicacy of representation. This became the style that marked the decline of the Roman world.
