#good to stretch my french a little. also really funny how whipped mr. poulsen obviously is. another one bites the dust

[nulfaga]

From Frédéric Poulsen, "Le buste du bronze de Cato trouvé à Volubilis", in the journal of the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres, 1947:

"The first thing which surprises [the viewer] about this admirably preserved bust is how clearly it has retained a certain rustic trace. This is a true country man, like to the wealthy farmers of the agricultural nations of our day. Cato, however, belonged to the stifling circle of the high Roman nobility (which fact is demonstrated above all by the marriages of his sisters and daughter). Here, he appears as the descendant of Cato Priscus, that prototype of the great Roman country man—and the urban life of multiple generations of that family, three of whose representatives held the consulship, has not erased this spirit.

The second great impression [one has] of this visage is the seriousness of its features, in perfect accord with the literary tradition: "It was difficult," Plutarch says (Plut. Cat. Min. 1-2), "to move Cato to laughter, and rare that a smile should appear on his face". He was harsh, tenacious, and, when ill, demonstrated an admirable forbearance.

Adding to the serious expression of those features is the movement of the head: it is turned toward the left shoulder and, at the same time, gently, peacefully inclined; and the movement which tenses the neck muscles, combined with the lines of the mouth, creates an impression of severity, even of unavailability. It is not impossible that the absence of colored stones, which would have once indicated the iris and pupils, contributes to the hardness of the gaze.

At the time of his death, Cato was forty-eight years old, but this portrait speaks of a man who lived a hard life and was aged prematurely by it. It is true that [one contemporary scholar] finds the Cato of this bust younger than the age of his death—an impression probably due to his observation of the bust's profile, since from that angle the expression is both younger and more peaceful, as if disclosing traces of the features of a young man; it is only by virtue of the large nose, particularly its curve, that a powerful masculine energy is revealed and even emphasized.

But, seen from the front, the face is haggard, the forehead is crossed by deep wrinkles that run parallel to the thick eyebrows, the creases that run down from the lower eyelids, the large and profound furrows of the cheeks, and the great lines between the mouth and chin, all contribute to give the face an expression of pain and age. In my opinion he could well have been a sexagenarian, this great country man with his proud, tranquil expression.

[...]

Even if the portrait from Volubilis dates from as late as ±150 years after Cato's death [the author dates the bust about the time of Domitian or Trajan, ed.], it goes without saying that an older and more contemporary portrait has been copied. This is confirmed when one observes the profile of the bust once more: one sees the tufts of hair in the nape of the neck shaped like long, curved leaves, and stylized in a bladelike form, a mode of stylization characteristic of precisely the period in which Cato lived, ±50 BCE.

[...]

Naturally we might suppose that a certain alteration of the features must have taken place in this transmission from copyist to copyist. [...] Where an artist, from the time of Nero for example, has copied a republican portrait meant for the atrium of a young, newlywed nobleman [an ancestral imago], the result is inevitably a mixture of styles, a circumstance which makes it still more difficult to date many Roman portraits.

Certain points of resemblance, then, may have been diminished in the face of the Volubilis Cato—on the other hand, the artistic effect could have been strengthened by an emphasis on the essential lines and forms of the visage. Happily, the artist appears to have stuck to the veracity of the original, without adding any suggestions of that saintliness or divine inspiration which the writers of the imperial era attribute to Cato, from Seneca to Plutarch."