St Andrews Lecturer tells truth about mouth of truth

Located on the porch of Santa Maria in Cosmedin, Rome, the original function of the ‘Bocca della Verità’ has, until now puzzled archaeologists. But now, St Andrews Art History lecturer, Dr Fabio Barry, thinks he has unveiled the truth: emperor Hadrian commissioned the famous face with hollow eyes, nostrils and mouth to be a drain cover in a shrine to Hercules.

Dr Barry’s research demoralises the ancient superstition that the ‘Bocca’ can reveal a person’s dishonesty. From around 1450, the Mouth was used to check a person’s chastity and by 1800 had become a ‘lie detector’, but it was Audrey Hepburn who made the ‘Bocca della Verità’ famous in the 1950s classic, ‘Roman Holiday’, and today hundreds of tourists queue to prove their fidelity by placing a hand in the mystical mouth – confident it won’t be bitten off.

Fabio’s – he’s half Italian, by the way – passion for Roman art and architecture was nurtured by countless trips to Rome during childhood. But it wasn’t Dr Barry’s move from being an architect to a life of academia that helped him discover the secret identity of the ‘Bocca’, it was a postcard from his Grandma! So we may as well quit our degrees now.

A glance at the postcard while bored at work led to his epiphany, as his gaze paused on the sculpture’s forked horns. A quick scan of the old ‘Lexicon of Mythology’, and Dr. Barry had identified the sculpture as Oceanus. Over the years archaeologists have argued that it is the face of several religious or mythological characters, but Dr. Barry argues that those horns can only belong to the god that symbolised the beginning of all waters, of all things, as well as the ends of the world.

The connection with Hercules’ shrine comes from the two of his twelve labours that took him beyond Ocean. This had a particular significance to Hadrian, who Dr Barry links to the ‘Bocca’ for stylistic reasons, whose expansion across to Britain perhaps reflected the heroic conquests of the god himself.