Ancient or Modern? The Enigmatic Case of the "Group" from Fayum

At the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek there are three important marble portraits representing Augustus (I.N. 1443), Livia (I.N. 1444), and Tiberius (I.N. 1445). They are generally considered as the “Group from Fayum,” but actually we should wonder whether it is an ancient or a modern group. These pieces, in fact, come from the antiquities market: Carl Jacobsen, the founder of the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, bought them in 1896 from the Greek-Egyptian art dealer Alexander Dingli, about whom we have only few biographical notes. The purchase was made through the mediation of the Danish orientalist Valdemar Schmidt, to whom Dingli wrote some letters in order to sell the sculptures. These documents, now at the Glyptotek, are very important because they throw light not only on the acquisition of the portraits but also on their find. The study of the letters, which I present in the first part of my paper, shows that there is not certainty about the fact that the three pieces were found together: so we do not know whether they were set up in the same place in the antiquity, forming in this way an ancient group, or if they were put together in modern times by the dealers. In the second part of the paper I propose to solve this problem through a stylistic and technical analysis, which consists of the presentation of the results of my autoptic observations on the sculptures, with detailed measurements of them, and of the results of the marble analysis made by Lorenzo Lazzarini for my research project. The first thing to note is that the head of Livia is smaller than the other two, but the portraits of Livia and Tiberius are very similar from a formal point of view. This affinity is confirmed by the marble analysis, which shows that Livia and Tiberius are made of the same kind of marble, while Augustus is made of a different one. In conclusion, I think that only the busts of Livia and Tiberius were originally made together, while the portrait of Augustus was added to the group at a later date, probably by the modern dealers