The Pelvic Golden Ratio in the Nude Portraits of Roman Emperors

Abstract

Abstract In contrast to the bodily shame that Romans inherited from the Etruscans, the emperors displayed naked in sculptures to enshrine their divine status. What factors determined that, for four centuries, this paradigm prevailed in the life of ancient Rome despite the transgression of morals? The theomorphic nude fulfilled functions of a divine „costume” which the emperor wore before his people to win their trust and loyalty. The supreme nude portrait was clothed in conventional meanings, which belong to a visual language specific to the Greco-Roman world. Anthropometric measurements confirm the conjunction of two complementary visual concerns: that of the Romans for facial identity and that of the Greeks for bodily identity. In this long and imperfect process, facies and habitus united in a fundamental theomorphism of Greco-Roman culture, with an anthropometric constant translated plastically remarkably rigorous – the pelvic golden section. While the idealization of the face had to be achieved within the limits of the emperor’s real features in order to make him recognizable, the perfection of the genital portrait was already canonized by the Greek masters. The measurements in this study show that the pelvic golden section may be an explanation for this recurrent plastic transliteration.