As in all his portraiture, Augustus is depicted as a fairly young man, whose appearance is greatly idealized when compared with descriptions of him in literature. Within the very controlled conventions of his portraits, this image indicates his old age; the face has been described as "strained, ailing, yet ideal and noble", and having "a distanced air of ageless majesty". Here he is seen from behind, but with his head turned in profile, considerably over-large for the body. He has thrown the
aegis, an attribute of
Jupiter, over his shoulder; much of this is in the upper brown layer of the stone. The
aegis is here imagined as a kind of decorated goatskin cloak with a hole for the head, which appears (improbably small) at Augustus' shoulder. The head of the
Gorgon is depicted in the white centre of the brown section, and there is another head on the other side of the
aegis, shown projecting at the left. This may be
Phobos, the personification of fear, who is often said in Greek literature to decorate the shields of heroes, and who
Homer said appeared on the
aegis. The pose and these details compare closely to a cameo in the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, which handles the body rather more effectively (see gallery). In New York one of the heads is interpreted as "a wind god, perhaps intended as a personification of the summer winds that brought the corn fleet from Egypt to Rome and so an oblique reference to Augustus’s annexation of Egypt after the defeat of Mark Antony and Cleopatra at
Actium in 31 B.C.". Augustus wears a royal
diadem, perhaps originally just shown as the band of cloth whose ends are tied at the back of the head. The strip of gold decorated with jewels is probably medieval, and is recorded as having been repaired at the start of the 18th century, when the cameo was in the collection of Leone
Strozzi,
Archbishop of Florence, which is as far back as its recorded history goes. This addition may indicate that it was incorporated in a
reliquary or some other medieval object, as with another cameo of Augustus used as a centrepiece for the
Cross of Lothair. A staff of some kind, perhaps a
sceptre or spear shaft, runs diagonally to the left, and the strap over the right shoulder is presumably for a sword at his waist. Similar poses with an
aegis are found in
Hellenistic art, and the intention was probably to suggest a "fighting ruler, in the tradition of
Alexander the Great", who was often shown wearing the
aegis.
Mark Antony was also depicted wearing it. As in other State Cameos, and Augustan monuments like the
Ara Pacis, the style is strongly neo-classical and idealistic, and in contrast to the realism that marked
Roman sculpture, especially in
portraits. Some
Roman patrician families continued to use the realist style, perhaps as a muted gesture against the Augustan
Principate; the style was also used by the wealthier
freedman class in their
tomb monuments. In the Blacas Cameo the idealizing style is perhaps associated with one of the few Roman artists whose name we know, Dioscurides of
Aegeae in
Cilicia, who
Pliny the Elder and
Suetonius say carved Augustus's personal seal, which is now lost, though other gems apparently signed by him survive. The existence of a "State workshop" producing these gems has been inferred, probably staffed by artists of Greek origin. The cameo appears to have been cut from a larger work. The surviving "State Gems" emerge from medieval collections where they were clearly highly prized, and are presumed, like the various
Late Antique consular diptychs and other ivories, to have survived above ground since antiquity. ==Gallery==