Head of a Roman Imperial Period Priest from the late 2nd to early 4th century CE now on display at the Dallas Museum of Art

Head of a Roman Imperial Period Priest from the late 2nd to early 4th century CE now on display at the Dallas Museum of Art.
The conical headdress goes back centuries in Near Eastern religious art. Originally the mark of a divinity, by the time of the Roman Empire it was the regalia of priests of various Syrian and Anatolian deities. A priest of the Anatolian mother-goddess Cybele in the museum in Ostia, Italy, wears such a headdress. The well-known frescoes from a synagogue in Dura-Europus, Syria, now in the Damascus museum, also show priests wearing such headdresses. However, the idealized nude Greek figures ornamenting the headdress on the Dallas Museum of Art head represent a complete fusion of Near Eastern beliefs and Greco-Roman style. The incised eyes, which give the figure a hypnotic intensity, are typical of such late Roman portraits and are often emphasized to suggest the spiritual state of the person represented. - Dallas Museum of Art


Image: Head of an Imperial Period Roman priest courtesy of the Dallas Museum of Art in Dallas, Texas.

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