ROMAN SCULPTURE (original) (raw)
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ON INTERPRETING THE ECLECTIC NATURE OF ROMAN SCULPTURE
Flexible combinations of 'old' and 'new' methodologies are probably the best way to interpret the eclectic nature of Roman sculpture. An analysis of three pieces of Roman sculpture—the 'Pseudo-Athlete' from Delos, the Prima Porta Augustus and the fourth-century donatio relief from the Arch of Constantine—demonstrates the value of older methods in the face of commanding theories produced by more recent methodology.
Destrée P., Murray P. (eds), Companion to Ancient Aesthetics, First Edition, Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World, 2015
Sculptures played an important role as decoration of private residences in Roman times. Subjects, themes, styles and even dimensions changed over time not just according to the aesthetic values of the Roman patrons, but also in relation to ideas of identity and status. Hadrian’s villa offers an excellent case for the study of ancient perception and display of sculptures within their architectural context. About five hundreds sculptures are said to come from this imperial estate, but until now it has been hardly possible to reconstruct their original setting within the general layout of the villa. By looking at the way sculptures were displayed, I will focus on three major notions that informed the planning of the villa’s sculptural decoration: aesthetic values, control over people’s behaviour, and the establishment of hierarchies within the diverse range of people that attended the emperor’s palace.
The originality of Roman sculpture
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ORIGINALITY in itself is an absolute quality; it is either there or not there. It can be present in some aspect, or aspects, and not in others. But its presence or absence can be determined only by relating the artifact which is supposed to contain it (be it a poem, a work of figurative art, a patented idea, or even a philosophical thought) with others preceding it in time. An industrial design presented for patent registration has to be original, otherwise it does not qualify as a new device, a new contribution to science or technology; it is worthless because it is only a repetition of something else that was created before it. So, even here, originality is judged by comparison with what precedes it. But it is rarely or never the case that the entire design, or designed object, is entirely new. Originality generally resides only in a part of the whole, but that partial novelty is conventionally accepted as constituting a new design, a new device. Apart from the common place and fa...
Public Sculpture and Social Practice in the Roman Empire
The Oxford Handbook of Roman Imagery and Iconography
One of the more fruitful lines of research in recent decades has been the exploration of how Roman sculpture interacted with the lives of its contemporary viewers. This chapter employs monumental reliefs, large-scale sculptures set up in public areas by official authorities, as a case study to examine how sculpture contributed to social practice under the Roman emperors. Particular focus is given to the phenomenon of imperial portrait types, the blending of history and myth in sculpted narratives, issues of visibility, and the afterlife of some reliefs. The chapter also examines possible means of evaluating responses to relief monuments, from provincial imitations, to private copies in other media, to the written record. In the end, monumental reliefs prove an excellent means to highlight the general dissonance between ancient and modern perceptions of sculpture.
Roman funerary sculpture: catalogue of the collections
Choice Reviews Online
A good deal of the preparatory work on this catalogue was completed during my two-month stay at the Getty Museum as a guest scholar in the spring of 1982. My thanks for this invitation go to the Trustees, to the director at that time, Stephen Garrett, to the former curator of antiquities, Jiff Frel, and to the Department of Education and Academic Affairs, especially to Laurie Fusco. Particular thanks are owed to Dr. Frel, who entrusted the publication of the imperial funerary monuments to the author as part of a planned catalogue of the sculpture at the Getty Museum; he also read the texts, provided many hints and suggestions, and discussed the dating and inscriptions as well as many other problems. Thanks also go to Donald Hull and Penelope Potter for the numerous photographs, to Marit Jentoft-Nilsen and Renate Dolin for their help, to Melanie Richter-Bernburg for the excellent translation, to Sandra Knudsen for her solicitous care of the manuscript, to Jane Crawford Frischer and Sylvia Tidwell for attentive editing, to Faya Causey, to Marion True and Andrea P.A. Belloli for seeing the book through to completion, and, finally, to Heidemarie Koch for her critical scrutiny of the texts and translations. For information, help, and photographic materials, I also wish to thank B.
DeStaebler - Kontokosta 2020 Roman Sculpture in Context SPAAA6 front
Roman Sculpture in Context (SPAAA6), 2020
This volume tackles a pressing issue in Roman art history: that many sculptures conventionally used in our scholarship and teaching lack adequate information about their find locations. Questions of context are complex, and any theoretical and methodological reframing of Roman sculpture demands academic transparency. This volume is dedicated to privileging content and context over traditions of style and aesthetics. Through case studies, the chapters illustrate multivariate ways to contextualize ancient objects. The authors encourage Roman art historians to look beyond conventional interpretations; to reclaim from the study of Greek sculpture the Roman originals that are too often relegated to discussions of “copies” and “models”; to consider the multiple, dynamic, and shifting contexts that one sculpture could experience over the centuries of its display; and to recognize that postantique receptions can also offer insight into interpretations of ancient viewers. The collected topics were originally presented in three conference sessions: “Grounding Roman Sculpture” (Archaeological Institute of America, 2019); “Ancient Sculpture in Context” (College Art Association, 2017); and “Ancient Sculpture in Context II: Reception” (College Art Association, 2019).
erhaps no art is more tightly tethered to history than sculpture. Sculpture is memorable, able to stand outside without being destroyed immediately by the sun, the rain, the wind. More durable than paintings and works on paper, sculptures are messengers of historical information in the present. The author and courtier Baldassare Castiglione summarized fifteenth-century theories of sculpture when he wrote early in the sixteenth century that, "being made to preserve memory, sculptures fulfill this function better than painting." 1 The faces of Roman emperors, their gestures, and costumes all came down to the fifteenth century in hard stone busts and cold bronze coins. This is not an exclusively fifteenth-century phenomenon. Modern scholars and archaeologists continue to use statuary as sources for their histories of past cultures. But the idea that sculpture carried historical information was first developed in the fifteenth century, at the moment when Italian scholars started to mine ancient objects for information about the Roman Empire and Republic, including the way that ancients dressed and kept their hair. This essay offers a range of examples of artifacts in stone and bronze that were considered, in fifteenth-century Italy, as deposits of historical rituals and customs. These examples show that, in the minds of certain viewers, such objects were able to tell the truth, even that you could trust sculpture more than text. This had something to do with the durability of sculpture: more resistant to wear and tear than painting, prints, and drawings, sculpture was believed to deliver history unchanged, as it was. But sculpture was also conceptually closer to nature and the unvarnished truth. With its possibility of life casting and other imprinting