Archived Pages from 20th Century!!



A Visual Compendium of Roman Emperors

The goal of this page is to present an illustrated list of Roman Emperors. While I was in Rome In July of 1995 the idea for this page hit me at some point in the Vatican museum. I had seen lists of emperors on the net and I figured these lists would be much more interesting if they had pictures as well. Thus, I tried to snap pics of as many emperors as I could find in various museums.

While I did quite a bit of reading before I went to Rome, and I could identify many of the more famous Roman Emperors, I ended up missing quite a few that I'm sure I had stood right next to many times. I'm very disappointed I didn't get a Caligula or a good Nero. And alas, since I have been back I have seen many photos in books of Emperors that were in some of the museums I visited but WERE NOT LABELED (Doh!) there. One such unfortunate lost opportunity was the Hercules-like bust of the Emperor Commodus in the Palazzo dei Conservatori. (See my note on picture contributions below)

Anyway, what follows is a list of the Roman emperors and whenever possible, their busts and/or any other contributions they made to Roman art or architecture. Click on the emperor's name to see his coin portrait.

This list is now essentially complete with respect to my trip to Italy last July (if I had my good camera when I was in Boston last month I could have gotten a few more from Harvard's Sackler gallery - doh!), and you can see I'm missing quite a few emperors. If anyone out there has pictures of sculpture portraits for any emperors I do not have, I would love to have an electronic copy to post to this site. I will provide appropriate acknowledgements and sufficiently shrink and JPEG each image so that it is not posted in publication quality. I will also tag it with your name if desired (like in my pics).

All sculpture photos are Copyright 1995 Justin D. Paola. Please acknowledge any re-use of these photos.

All of the original photos on this page are for sale as well. See this page for details. Essentially, I'll sell you an 8x10 of any of these pictures for $12 plus shipping and handling.

Since I probably won't make it to Europe again for a few more years, I thought I would flesh out the sculpture pictures with scans from external sources. For some of the emperors that I do not have my own pictures of, I have scanned pictures from a variety of sources and put these on the page with the link titled "Scanned Portrait". Since these are not my original photos, use at your own risk...

Last update July 7, 1996.

The identify-an-emperor Contest!

Yes, YOU can help me identify these miscellaneous Roman emperors. The majority of sculptures in most of the museums were stacked on shelves and utterly lacking in documentation. Others were labeled and I simply forgot. The following batch are all from the Vatican museum. Help me identify these suckers. Prizes are negotiable.

Completely unidentified portraits: Imperial family members

The votes: Agrippina Minor (2), Germanicus (1) Severus Alexander (1)

There are also a few brand new (as of July 4th, 1996) photos that I have finally scanned and tentatively identified and placed in the list below. Please let me know if you think any of the following are incorrectly identified:
Maximinus Thrax
Nerva
Pupienus
And the shakiest one of all, a full-sized female statue in the Vatican museum that I have very tentatively identified as Sabina, Hadrian's empress.

Roman Dictators


Roman Emperors (27 BC - 117 AD)

More Emperors...

Comments?
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Justin D. Paola
Digital Image Analysis Laboratory
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering,
University of Arizona,
Tucson, AZ 85721
(520) 621-4554
[email protected]