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EveryHairstyle

Style capital, Italy

Rome

Busts in the Capitoline Museums show Roman women's towering curls and men's short combed cuts; the Vatican kept the tonsure.

Rome's museums, above all the Capitoline Museums on the Capitoline Hill, hold portrait busts that record Roman hair in detail: Julius Caesar's short cut combed forward, the tall rows of curls worn by Flavian women, and the braided buns of later empresses. The city is also the centre of the Catholic Church, which for centuries required the tonsure, the shaved crown, of its clergy.

Roman portraits

Roman women's hairstyles changed with the women of the imperial family, and busts can be dated by them. The Fonseca bust in the Capitoline Museums, from about AD 90 to 100, shows a high crest of curls at the front and coiled braids at the back. In the 2000s the hairdresser and amateur archaeologist Janet Stephens showed that such styles could be made by sewing the braids in place with needle and thread. Men usually wore short hair, and the beard came into fashion with Hadrian.

The tonsure

From early medieval times, Catholic monks and clergy wore the Roman tonsure, the crown of the head shaved and a ring of hair left, said to recall Christ's crown of thorns. Irish monks wore a different, front-shaved tonsure until the Synod of Whitby in 664 favoured the Roman form. In 1972 Pope Paul VI ended the requirement of tonsure on entering the clergy, though some religious orders keep it.

Hairstyles of Rome

Roman hairstylesThe styles shown in Roman portrait bustsCaesar cutThe short, forward-combed cut named after CaesarTonsureThe shaved crown of Catholic clergyTitus cutA short cut named after the emperor Titus

Still to be written: Greco-Roman hairstyle.

Photo credits on this page

The small pictures above come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences. Some are cropped to fit.

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