Divine Iconography in Funerary Portraits of Roman Children

Laura L. Garofalo (Northwestern University)

Children’s funerary monuments provide insight into the ways in which children were viewed and represented in Roman society. Understanding children’s funerary portraiture is especially useful in this regard, as portraits of children often differ significantly from those of adults. In their respective studies of Roman funerary altars and children’s sarcophagi, Kleiner and Huskinson have discussed broader themes of portraiture in funerary iconography.

This paper examines a particular subset of these depictions, discussing iconographic allusions to divinity in children’s monuments. I suggest that children are often represented with elements of the divine not only to suggest hope for continued life after death, but also as shorthand for unattained stages of adulthood. In this paradox of representation, children can be commemorated in immortal play alongside divine beings, but also in a mature role as an adult god.

Several monuments commemorating girls portray the deceased with traditional elements of Venus. Though many of the accompanying inscriptions or other elements of the monument suggest a very young age at death, girls are often depicted with slightly sexualized off-the-shoulder drapery. I shall argue that this element alludes to a sense of unattained womanhood, while also emulating adult portrait allusions to Venus.

Other girls are depicted as Diana, alluding to the deceased’s youth and purity. Yet even in these depictions, girls are often commemorated in more mature bodies than their age at death. One funerary altar now in the Louvre commemorates a young girl on one side with a lunate crown, and on the back of the altar, depicts a young woman in a radiate crown with facial features resembling the girl. This sort of depiction suggests a sense of maturation through divinity, commemorating the deceased both as the child they were as well as the adult they never became.

In a more playful mode, children are often depicted as, or alongside, putti. Common themes on adult sarcophagi were often adapted for the needs of children, including those which replaced the human actors on adult sarcophagi with putti in a similar scene. Often the deceased child is included among the putti, and in some bibliographical sarcophagi, the child is depicted with wings in an apotheosis scene. In these examples, allusions to divinity are used to suggest immortality, softening the loss of a child, while also symbolically placing the child in adult roles mediated by the divine.