Some aspiring political and military leaders adopted the fashions of Hellenistic court portraiture, but Caesar favoured the veristic style, discrediting its republican origins by becoming the first Roman to have his own portrait on coins minted during his lifetime, and permitting his images to be carried on litters and set up on sacred platforms. bc, when the ancestral portrait was used in the struggle for political leadership in the late republic. Most surviving republican Roman portraits date to the 1st cent.
The right to keep and display such portraits was restricted to the nobility (see nobiles) and to the families of serving magistrates. Polybius records the practice at the funeral processions of great men of dressing young men of the family in the clothes and death masks (see imagines) of those distinguished ancestors whom they most resembled he and Pliny the Elder describe the ancestral portraits kept in genealogical order in noble houses together with a written record of the achievements of the dead. The origins of the veristic style remain obscure, but republican customs suggest that portraits were used by the Romans to exemplify noble behaviour. noted for its verism, the meticulous recording of facial characteristics including such unflattering features as wrinkles, warts, and moles.
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