English: An ancient Roman fresco from the House of the Orchard in Pompeii, Italy, dated to the 1st century AD, depicting the bust of a woman in a frame, wearing a necklace a cloth headband over her hair, perhaps a Hellenistic Greek royal diadem.

In relation to another potentially posthumous portrait of Cleopatra VII of Egypt painted at roughly the same time in Roman Herculaneum, Walker, Susan; Higgs, Peter (2001), "325 Painting with a portrait of a woman in profile", in Walker, Susan; Higgs, Peter (eds.), Cleopatra of Egypt: from History to Myth, Princeton University Press (British Museum Press), ISBN 9780691088358, pp. 314–315, describe this painting from the House of the Orchard, dating it to the Pompeian Third Style of the mid-1st century AD:

A close comparison to this painted portrait is to be found on the walls of the House of the Orchard at Pompeii. This house contained several Egyptianizing scenes, and the comparable bust is painted in a frame, not unlike this one, next to a Greek-style sphinx. The woman in the Pompeian painting has a blue crossed-band around her head, not quite a royal diadem, but the form of the bust is identical. The paintings from the House of the Orchard have been classified within the Third Style of Pompeian Painting, and the room in question has been identified as a Vespasianic (AD 69-79) addition to an Augustan suite, its style following that of earlier rooms. This portrait from Herculaneum is so like the bust in the House of the Orchard that the two works, though from different sites, may even be by the same painter. Who exactly this woman represents is a mystery, and her resemblance to Cleopatra VII may be coincidental, but it is not completely out of the question that a posthumous image of the famous queen (perhaps derived from a cameo) would have been painted in a Roman house, and possibly in a room with Egyptianizing decoration, like that in the House of the Orchard at Pompeii.

An alternative identification of the woman in the painting is suggested by Carratelli, Giovanni Pugliese Carratelli (1990), Pompeii: Pitture e Mosaici, vol. 2, Roma : Istituto della enciclopedia italiana, fig. 107, OCLC: 469686885 (language: Italian). In it, Carratelli describes the tufts of wavy hair draped around the temples and forehead of this feminine bust as being similar to portraits of Livia Drusilla, the wife of Roman emperor Augustus:

In questo busto feminine si vidono ancora meglio i capelli ondulati intorno alle tempie, che lasciano l'orrechio scoperto e formano e ciuffo alto sulla fronte, come nel ritratto di Livia.