Head of Nero

In April of AD 65 a plot to kill Nero was uncovered before it could be carried out. It took its name from the senator Gaius Calpurnius Piso, whom the conspirators meant to make emperor, and the historian Tacitus describes the reckoning that followed. Among those ordered to take their own lives were Piso himself, the poet Lucan, and Seneca, the philosopher who had once been Nero's tutor.

The museum dates this head to around that same year. Nero was in his late twenties, and the sculptor shows him in the fourth of his official portrait types, with a full, fleshy face and a thick neck. The hair falls to the nape and is laid over the brow in a row of sickle-shaped curls. The biographer Suetonius describes the fashion with disapproval. Nero, he writes, always wore his hair arranged in tiers, and later, on his tour of Greece, let it grow long at the back.

The marble has suffered. The nose and the rims of the ears are plaster additions, there are plaster patches on the chin, and the neck was cut down in modern times.