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The larger-than-life Getty statue of Faustina the Elder uses a standardized body type, commonly called "Large Herculaneum Woman",  with a conventional portrait head of Faustina from fairly late in her life, though the statue itself may be posthumous. The Getty Faustina is in remarkably good condition. The original nose was broken off in ancient times. Her current nose is a restoration - in fact it is her second new nose. We will propose a third.

Even the most skilled restorers - ancient and modern - have to deal with the question of what the original piece looked like. Since intact marble portraits of the same subject often show a wide range of interpretation of their regal subjects, restorers must, at best, pick one of them to use as a model and faithfully reproduce it, making adjustments needed to fit the recreated parts into the voids on the restored piece. Apparently, the skills required to do this are sufficiently different than those required to produce an original, because otherwise highly rated sculptors have produced some appalling results. Art historians rail at such work, finding the restorations less pleasing to view than were the heads in their mutilated state. For example, Cornelius Vermeule describes the restorations of pieces acquired by the Duke of Devonshire as follows.

The restorers who fashioned Faustina's current nose did refer to other sculptures of her and to her numismatic images; and their artistic abilities were in fact first-rate - far from the sort Vermeule rails against. Still yet, some additional historical research combined with some anthropometric analysis could have resulted in a better nose.

Intact sculptures reveal that Faustina was by no means the ideal of feminine Hellenistic beauty. She is commonly described as homely, matronly, and dowdy [1]. We cannot know what Faustina really looked like. We can accept on good grounds the Capitoline head from Lanuvio (ancient Lanivium, Latium) as perhaps the definitive Faustina portrait, not on its quality as measured by an artist, but on the judgment of its original audience. It was found in the location most treasured by those who most treasured Faustina - the villa of Antoninus Pius, her husband who survived her by twenty years and never remarried. THe colossal bust of Faustina in the Vatican was no doubt an importance piece in its day, but its current nose is a restoration. Faustina's coin portraits should be ignored altogether; they vary widely without having a dominant type.

By using photographs carefully recorded for the specific purpose of craniofacial measurements, we have identified landmarks on the Getty and Capitoline heads and recorded key angles and proportions commonly used by surgeons in planning reconstructive or aesthetic plastic surgery (see references below).

A surgeon would look at the restorative work done on the Getty statue something like this. The Lanuvio portrait has a nose height to face height ratio of  .46, one standard deviation below human white female mean. Her nasal index is 0.64 (equals female mean). The Getty statue head, as restored, has a nose height to face height ratio of 0.50 (2 SD above mean) and a nasal index of 0.66 (~1/2 SD above mean).

Faustina's nose is somewhat longer than average. That this is not apparent from the ratio of nose height to face height is a consequence of a horizontal mandibular deficiency, apparent in the profile view. To remove the effect of the mandibular deficiency, we compared nose height to face width as determined by interzygomatic distance. The Lanuvio head shows a nose length to face width ratio that is two SD above human mean. The same ratio on the Getty head is four SD above human mean.

The Lanuvio head's nasofacial angle is about 28 degrees, two degrees smaller than the average for white women, although portraits of ancient Roman women seem to regularly fall below the mean for modern white women. Its nasolabial angle is just over 100 degrees, about average for human women. By contrast the nasolabial angle of the Getty head is under 90 degrees and the nasofacial angle is below that of the Lanuvio head.

(See appendix for definitions of landmarks)

The nose/nostril shape of the Lanuvio head would be viewed in facial anthropometry as type 2 or 2-1 in Farkas' modified Topinard classification. The restored Getty features indicate type 4. This is also consistent with the colossal bust of Faustina in the Vatican, indicating perhaps that its restorers and the Getty restorers drew from the same source for their restorations.

         
Denarius, RIC 351.                     Colossal bust of Faustina, Vatican, Round Room.
 

Approximate nose shapes for the Lanuvio and Getty portraits.
 

A non-surgeon's summary can be stated more simply. Faustina's nose (that of the Lanuvio portrait) is slightly longer than average, and of average width and shape. Her relatively small nose height as compared to face height is not due to a small nose, but is due to a small chin and lower jaw. The artists who restored the Getty head gave her a slightly longer and wider nose than that of the Lanuvio head, with angles and dimensions farther away from the average human nose than the angles and dimensions of the Lanuvio head. In common terms, they, like the Vatican portrait restorers, probably ended up with a Faustina that was more homely than she needed to be.

Faustina's numismatic nose types - the denarius naris

We have applied the ratios of measurements between facial landmarks taken from the Capitoline head to the Getty head and (digitally) given her a new nose, one very close to the nose of the Lanuvio head, which we suspect is closer to the original nose of the Getty statue. The results are shown below.