Kunsthistorisches Museum unveils 'My Story': New exhibition cracks the code of Roman women's hairstyles

VIENNA.— My Story opens with two previously unseen portraits of women, offering direct and surprising insights into current research on Roman portraits.

The Collection of Greek and Roman Antiquities at the Kunsthistorisches Museum houses around 250 Roman marble portraits. Their particular impact lies, to this day, in the immediacy with which they bring people from a distant past to life. In this special exhibition, the ancient sculptures themselves take the floor, telling us about their appearance and the central role played by an often-underestimated detail: their hairstyle. This allows us to explore key questions in portrait research – from dating to identity.

Research as detective work

The special exhibition is part of a comprehensive research project dedicated to the ‘biographies’ of ancient sculptures. At its heart lies the question: how can a work be assessed when it no longer reflects its state upon discovery, but bears the traces of a long post-ancient history? For many portraits were altered on multiple occasions – not just since the Renaissance, but as early as antiquity. Heads were given new hairstyles, adapted to changing fashions or for pragmatic reasons such as a shortage of materials. Thus, a portrait was repeatedly reinterpreted and reshaped.

The most important dating criterion for research remains the hairstyle, which closely follows the fashions of the respective imperial court. Simultaneously, the alterations reveal how works of art were adapted to the tastes of the time. Damage caused by centuries of storage was also repaired to make the pieces presentable once more. A particularly revealing example in the special exhibition is a proud Roman woman who originally wore the curly hairstyle of Empress Domitia, before being given a braided wreath in the style of Empress Helena in a later alteration.

Modern methods such as material analysis and restoration studies reveal these interventions and help distinguish original from additions. Restoration thus becomes a search for clues that uncovers hidden stories.

In dialogue with the world

The project is part of an international research network that is increasingly dedicated to female portraits – long a marginal topic. Collaborations, interdisciplinary approaches and digital reconstructions open up new perspectives on the role of these portraits in ancient society, their symbolic meanings, as well as their varied reception from antiquity to the modern era.

What coins tell us

In the Roman Empire, coins were far more than a means of payment: they served as vehicles for imperial visual policy and disseminated the portraits of the ruling dynasty throughout the empire. With impressive precision, even the smallest spaces feature meticulously rendered hairstyles – models that private individuals also used as inspiration for their own portraits on funerary busts, tomb reliefs, or sarcophagi.
Since the Renaissance, researchers have used these details, together with the inscriptions, to identify and date marble portraits.

Two women, two stories

At the heart of the exhibition are two very different portraits of women – both marked by interventions and alterations.

One of the busts is thought to depict the deified Julia (61–89 AD), daughter of Emperor Titus and niece of Emperor Domitian of the Flavian dynasty. She wears a distinctive hairstyle with a lock of hair falling over her forehead, a feature indicative of her rank and the era. The body is a sophisticated montage of ancient fragments – a capital and architectural ornamentation, added in the sixteenth century – so skilfully executed that the alterations went unnoticed for a long time. Here, ancient material meets early modern creative intent.

The second exhibit – a funerary relief of an elderly woman in the style of the ‘Great
Herculaneum Woman’ – tells a different story. She too wears a hairstyle typical of the period, identifying her as a contemporary of Julia. Her precious, traditional clothing suggests she was a wealthy woman. Yet her original context has been lost: cut out of a larger setting, the frame and accompanying figures, such as her husband, are now missing.

Both works presumably reached the Venetian art market via maritime trade from Attica and from there, in the eighteenth century, entered the collection of the Marchese Tommaso Obizzi (d.1803), who established his own museum of antiquities in his castle at Catajo near Padua.

The other selected portraits of women in the collection expand this perspective and unfold an impressive panorama of female self-representation in antiquity – multifaceted, changeable, and astonishingly vivid.

Vitrine EXTRA

This series of presentations, held within the permanent exhibition of the Kunsthistorisches Museum’s Collection of Greek and Roman Antiquities, periodically explores various aspects of classical Antiquity, throwing a new light on old artefacts by showcasing objects long in storage or newly restored, analysed and researched, things that are fascinating and amusing, curious and inspiring.