This figure of a mournful mature Roman woman was wrongly called Agrippina until the start of the twentieth century. To compound the confusion there were two Agrippinas in the Julio-Claudian family tree, mother and daughter, and there is a similar sculpture called Agrippina now in the Capitoline Museum in Rome.
Agrippina Major and Minor had died by 59 CE, both in their forties. This portrait has been dated to well after that period, perhaps even as late as the fourth century
Naples, National Museum 977
Purchased in 1884 from Berlin
Lippold: Griechische Plastik, 155 (n.5)
Ruesch: Guide to the National Museum, Naples, 235
Bernoulli: Griechische Ikonographie (1901), II, 1, pl. XXII
Walston: Catalogue of Casts in the Museum of Classical Archaeology (1889), 110, no.578
Reporter: 19 June 1885, 894, no.516
De Grummond, in Journal of the History of Collections, vol.3, no.2 (1991), 177
From the Farnese collection
