A Portrait of Nero, Recut as Domitian and Restored as Nero Again
Carved between AD 59 and 68, recut as Domitian after Nero's fall, and restored as Nero once more around 1600. The Capitoline head is a physical record of how Rome dealt with an emperor it had condemned: not by removing the marble, but by changing whose face it wore.
The senate declared Nero a public enemy and his memory was formally attacked — statues recut, inscriptions erased, coins withdrawn. That process shaped almost everything later written about his court, because the writers who survived him had every reason to make the case against him. The stories of the palace intrigues come to us through Tacitus, Suetonius and Cassius Dio, all writing decades later and none of them neutral. The head is in the Musei Capitolini, from the Giustiniani and Albani collections. See power and intrigue in the court of Nero.
CC BY-SA 2.0 — source (Wikimedia Commons). Free to reuse under the stated licence.
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