The detail
Look just above her forehead. Two small holes. They are ancient, and they once held a separate piece of marble: a tall crescent of curls, the hairpiece every fashionable woman wore in Rome around the year 110. It is gone. What’s left is the plain band underneath — the part no one was meant to see.
The record
The museum’s own note says she looks like the empress Plotina, Trajan’s wife. Not a portrait of the empress — a portrait in her style, the way people once copied a magazine cover. We don’t know her name.
The line to keep
A hairstyle can date a face to a decade. Hers has been missing for centuries.