This is my portrait of Dea Africa, a Roman goddess-like entity who personified the imperial province of Africa (which to them meant the area of Tunisia and the northwestern coast of modern Libya). Roman artists traditionally depicted her wearing a helmet modeled after an African elephant’s head and with braided or dreadlocked hair, but otherwise made her look more Italian than African in accordance with their prevailing beauty ideals. Nonetheless, I wanted my version to look, well, African even without the elephant helmet, with some ritual scarifications and Amazigh-style tattoos to boot.
Dea Africa is unlikely to have been a major deity in the Roman pantheon, but sometimes she was associated with a cornucopia (horn of plenty) to represent fertility, which may refer to Rome’s North African provinces serving as a breadbasket for the Empire.