Famous Pieces of Ancient Roman Sculpture | Early European History And Religion

COLLECTIONS OF ROMAN SCULPTURE

Roman copy of a 4th century Greek statue of Artemis

The Capitoline Museum in Rome (located on Capitole Hill) is most well know for its Greek and Roman sculptures and collection of Etruscan vases, sculptures and sarcophagi. The most interesting piece in the museum is a famous Etruscan bronze of a crazy-eyed she-wolf being suckled by Renaissance depictions of Romulus and Remus who were added to the statue in the 15th century.

The Capitoline Museum has some of Rome's most famous sculptures, including a marble copy of famous third-century B.C. “Dying Gaul" statue, “Satyr Resting” (the inspiration for Hawthorne's "Marble Faun") and “Venus Prudens.” In the Palazzo dei Conservatori you can see the eight-foot-high bugged eyed head and foot of Constantine the Great, his equally large foot and statues of a woman with a curly cue haircut, and a Roman patrician carrying the heads of his ancestors.

Museum delle Terme in Rome features two of the most famous sculptures in Greco-Roman art: a marble copy of the discus thrower ( an image closely associated with the Olympics) and the Dying Niobid (450-440 B.C.). The latter is an image of a woman, who according to legend, boasted about he fourteen children and humiliated the mother of Apollo and Artemis. To get even the two gods killed all of her children and then shot her in the back with an arrow. In an frantic attempt to reach back and remove the arrow her peplos fell off. She is the earliest large female nude in Greek art.

The Pio Clementine Museum in the Vatican contains one of the worlds best collection of antique sculpture, most of its from ancient Rome. The museum's most outstanding sculpture is the Lacoon which features a father and two sons struggling to disentangle themselves from the grasps of giant serpents. The 2000-year-old statue depicts the punishment meted out to a priest who warned the Trojans to beware of Greeks bearing gifts.

The Lacoon and the Vatican Museum other most famous statue — the “Apollo Belvedere” — are located outside in a protected area around a round courtyard. Described by one critic as "a symbol of all that is young and free strong and gracious," the Apollo Belvedere glorifies the male body and is most likely a copy of a Greek bronze made by Leochares around 330 B.C. The original once stood in the Agora in Athens but is now lost. The copy at the Vatican lacks its left hand and most of its arm. Scholar believe the right hand held a quiver and the left hand a bow. The elegant cloak is still in place, The first item in the Vatican collection, the Apollo Belvedere stood for four centuries in a niche in the Octagonal court until it was taken by Napoleon's army in 1798 and kept in Paris until 1816, when it was returned. For several centuries it had an fig leaf over it private parts. Other works worth checking out are the sculpture “Aphrodite of the Cnidians,” the red sarcophagus of Saint Helen (Constantine's mother), and two rooms full of sculptures of animals. One 25-meter-long hallway contains several pieces of Roman sculpture. It is worthwhile to check for hairstyles and faces to get a sense of what people looked like in ancient Rome.

The National Roman Museum (Palazzo Massimo, a few blocks from Termini station) has an extensive collection of mosaics, murals, sculptures and coins. Situated inside a pink 19th-century neo-Renaissance villa, it features a frescoed dining room of Livia Drusilla, the cruel wife of Emperor Augustus who was featured in Robert Graves novel “I Claudius” , and four other brilliantly colored rooms from am imperial villa known as Villa della Farnesina. Worth checking out are the Statue of Niobid, a 5th century Greek statue believed to have belonged to Julius Caesar, Roman busts, an entire room of Roman sarcophagi (some with Christian influences), mosaics that range from 2nd century B.C. to 4th century A.D., and the Nymphaeum, a first century ornamental fountain where Nero used indulge himself with his courtiers.

Dying Gaul

Dying Gaul

The “Dying Gaul,” is one of the most famous and most copied ancient Roman sculpture. Created in the A.D. first or second century, the larger-than-life-size statue is likely a Roman replica of an earlier Greek bronze. It has only left Italy twice: in 1797, when Napoleonic forces took the sculpture to Paris, where it was displayed at the Louvre until its return to Rome in 1816, and 2013, when it was exhibited at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.

Philip Kennicott wrote in the Washington Post: “There are few statues more celebrated than the Dying Gaul, and even fewer that can equal its emotional power. It depicts a young man with thick, matted hair, lying on the ground, supporting his slightly turned torso with a muscular right arm. A small slit in his chest and a few drops of gore tell us he is dying, and many people see on his downturned face a look of stoic pain. For many years after the statue was discovered early in the 17th century, the figure was identified as a dying gladiator. But various clues, including a tight-fitting necklace or torque and references in Pliny the Elder (the Roman author) to statues depicting the defeated Gauls, lead most scholars to conclude that he is a member of the far-flung tribe that harassed Mediterranean empires from the Greeks to the Romans. [Source: Philip Kennicott, Washington Post, December 12, 2013. Philip Kennicott is the Pulitzer Prize-winning Art and Architecture Critic of The Washington Post]

“The Greek original, if the scholarly consensus is correct, was installed in a sanctuary devoted to Athena, in the small but ambitious kingdom of Pergamum (now in Turkey) sometime in the third century B.C. The Attalid kings of Pergamum were a bunch of industrious nobodies who managed to lay claim to a shard of Alexander the Great’s vast but short-lived empire. Rather like the Gulf Arab states today, they used art to build up their international prestige, and Pergamum became a wonder of bombastic architectural excess. They were later absorbed into Rome, but not before defining what is still called the Pergamene Style, which emphasized emotional appeal and almost Baroque volatility. Nothing defines that style quite as clearly as the Dying Gaul, who is both tragic and sensual, firing both our desire and our sense of compassion.

“Almost every book on ancient sculpture includes a photograph of the statue, which is held by the Capitoline Museum in Rome. But photographs give a minimal sense of the work. The young man’s posture is closed, his face turned down, his torso twisted, his left arm crossing his loins to grip his right thigh. His supine body defines a space, into which he appears to stare intently, as if his suffering or fate is physically present on the ground next to him. Photographs also don’t clearly render the sword (part of a later restoration) and trumpet on the ground beside him. Or the curious circular incisions and pentagram near one of his feet, which baffle scholars today. Nor do they capture the small details of his physical perfection, the veins in his arms, the slight crease of skin around his midsection, and the delicate strength in his hands and feet. “After the statue was discovered, it quickly became a model for artists across Europe. Autocrats commissioned replicas, small bronze reproductions circulated among collectors, and artists studied it, painted it and imitated it. Thomas Jefferson wanted it, or a reproduction of it, for an art gallery he planned but never realized at Monticello. But we know more about its influence and afterlife as an ancient treasure than we know about what it depicts, who made it and how it was received by its original audience. Some scholars think it may not be a Roman reproduction at all, but a Greek original. Others, including the authors of the Oxford History of Classical Art, question whether the brief reference in Pliny refers to this work.

Laocoön Group

“The data points of the statue’s provenance are several but inconclusive: There are empty plinths for statues in Pergamum which would happily accommodate a statue of this size; there is Pliny’s reference to the Gauls and the Attalid kings who defeated them (“Several artists have represented the battles fought by Attalus and Eumenes with the Galli”), and to Nero, who brought work from Pergamum to Rome, which would explain how it made it from Asia Minor to what is now Italy. “I find it hard to dismiss Pliny,” says National Gallery curator Susan Arensberg, who organized the exhibition on the American side. Add to that the Roman’s particular interest in the Gauls — which kept them busy on the battlefield for centuries — and it’s easy to accept the standard narrative. But without a time machine, no one will ever know whether the young man was meant to appeal an ancient sense of pity, sadism or smug triumphalism.

“It’s tempting, given his beauty, to assume that pity was at least part of the mix. The particular flavor of that pity, heard as well in plays such as Aeschylus’s “The Persians,” which humanizes a defeated but dangerous enemy, is mostly foreign to contemporary audiences. The closest we might get are cryptic lines from the poet Wilfrid Owen, who died in World War I. Owen wrote that his subject was “the pity of war,” by which he seemed to mean a sense of commonality among soldiers that transcends political or military differences, as if the truth of war is how it connects rather than divides the people who fight it. “I am the enemy you killed, my friend,” wrote Owen, a sentiment ready made for projection onto this mysterious but deeply beautiful statue.”

Laocoon Group

The Laocoon Group, also called Laocoön and His Sons, features a father and two sons struggling to disentangle themselves from the grasps of giant serpents. The 2000-year-old statue depicts the punishment meted out to a priest who warned the Trojans to beware of Greeks bearing gifts. Although mostly in excellent condition for an excavated sculpture, the group is missing several parts, and analysis suggests that it was remodelled in ancient times and has undergone a number of restorations since it was excavated. It is on display in the Museo Pio-Clementino, a part of the Vatican Museums. The Laocoön Group has been one of the most famous ancient sculptures ever since it was excavated in Rome in 1506. It is very likely the same statue praised in the highest terms by the main Roman writer on art, Pliny the Elder. The figures are near life-size and the group is a little over 2 m (6 ft 7 in) in height, showing the Trojan priest Laocoön and his sons Antiphantes and Thymbraeus being attacked by sea serpents. [Source: Wikipedia +]

The group has been called "the prototypical icon of human agony" in Western art,[4] and unlike the agony often depicted in Christian art showing the Passion of Jesus and martyrs, this suffering has no redemptive power or reward. The suffering is shown through the contorted expressions of the faces (Charles Darwin pointed out that Laocoön's bulging eyebrows are physiologically impossible), which are matched by the struggling bodies, especially that of Laocoön himself, with every part of his body straining. +

Pliny attributes the work, then in the palace of Emperor Titus, to three Greek sculptors from the island of Rhodes: Agesander, Athenodoros and Polydorus, but does not give a date or patron. In style it is considered "one of the finest examples of the Hellenistic baroque" and certainly in the Greek tradition, but it is not known whether it is an original work or a copy of an earlier sculpture, probably in bronze, or made for a Greek or Roman commission. The view that it is an original work of the 2nd century B.C. now has few if any supporters, although many still see it as a copy of such a work made in the early Imperial period, probably of a bronze original. Others see it as probably an original work of the later period, continuing to use the Pergamene style of some two centuries earlier. In either case, it was probably commissioned for the home of a wealthy Roman, possibly of the Imperial family. Various dates have been suggested for the statue, ranging from about 200 B.C. to the A.D. 70s, though "a Julio-Claudian date — between 27 BC and 68 AD — is now preferred". +

bacchanal relief

Roman Copies of Greek Statues

According to the Metropolitan Museum of Art: “In the late fourth century B.C., the Romans initiated a policy of expansion that in 300 years made them the masters of the Mediterranean world. Impressed by the wealth, culture, and beauty of the Greek cities, victorious generals returned to Rome with booty that included works of art in all media. Soon, educated and wealthy Romans desired works of art that evoked Greek culture. To meet this demand, Greek and Roman artists created marble and bronze copies of the famous Greek statues. Molds taken from the original sculptures were used to make plaster casts that could be shipped to workshops anywhere in the Roman empire, where they were then replicated in marble or bronze. Artists used hollow plaster casts to produce bronze replicas. Solid plaster casts with numerous points of measurement were used for marble copies. Since copies in marble lack the tensile strength of bronze, they required struts or supports, which were often carved in the form of tree trunks, figures, or other kinds of images. [Source: Department of Greek and Roman Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, October 2002, metmuseum.org \^/]

“Although many Roman sculptures are purely Roman in their conception, others are carefully measured, exact copies of Greek statues, or variants of Greek prototypes adapted to the taste of the Roman patron. Some Roman sculptures are a pastiche of more than one Greek original, others combine the image of a Greek god or athlete with a Roman portrait head. The meaning of the original Greek statue often lent beauty, importance, or a heroic quality to the person portrayed. By the second century A.D., the demand for copies of Greek statues was enormous—besides their domestic popularity, the numerous public monuments, theaters, and public baths throughout the Roman empire were decorated with niches filled with marble and bronze statuary. \^/

“Since most ancient bronze statues have been lost or were melted down to reuse the valuable metal, Roman copies in marble and bronze often provide our primary visual evidence of masterpieces by famous Greek sculptors.” \^/

Roman Portrait Sculpture

According to the Metropolitan Museum of Art: Roman portraiture is found on “a variety of media, most significantly sculpture and coins, but also gems, glass, and painting. This great diversity of material reflects the various uses, both public and private, for which the Romans created their portraits. Roman portraiture is also unique in comparison to that of other ancient cultures because of the quantity of surviving examples, as well as the complex and ever-evolving stylistic treatment of human features and character. [Source: Rosemarie Trentinella, Department of Greek and Roman Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, October 2003, metmuseum.org \^/]

Julius Caesar

Private portrait sculpture was most closely associated with funerary contexts. Funerary altars and tomb structures were adorned with portrait reliefs of the deceased along with short inscriptions noting their family or patrons, and portrait busts accompanied cinerary urns that were deposited in the niches of large, communal tombs known as columbaria. This funerary context for portrait sculpture was rooted in the longstanding tradition of the display of wax portrait masks, called imagines, in funeral processions of the upper classes to commemorate their distinguished ancestry. These masks, portraits of noted ancestors who had held public office or been awarded special honors, were proudly housed in the household lararium, or family shrine, along with busts made of bronze, marble, or terracotta. In displaying these portraits so prominently in the public sphere, aristocratic families were able to celebrate their history of public service while honoring their deceased relatives. \^/

“In the Republic, public sculpture included honorific portrait statues of political officials or military commanders erected by the order of their peers in the Senate. These statues were typically erected to celebrate a noted military achievement, usually in connection with an official triumph, or to commemorate some worthy political achievement, such as the drafting of a treaty. A dedicatory inscription, called a cursus honorum, detailed the subject's honors and life achievements, as well as his lineage and notable ancestors. These inscriptions typically accompanied public portraits and were a uniquely Roman feature of commemoration. \^/

“The express mention of the subject's family history reflects the great influence that family history had on a Roman's political career. The Romans believed that ancestry was the best indicator of a man's ability, and so if you were the descendant of great military commanders, then you, too, had the potential to be one as well. The intense political rivalry of the late Republican period gave special meaning to the display of one's lineage and therefore necessitated its emphasis, manifested in such traditions as the cursus, wax imagines, and funerary processions, as an essential factor for success. \^/

Caligula

“With the establishment of the principate system under Augustus, the imperial family and its circle soon came to monopolize official public statuary. Official imperial portrait types were principally displayed in sebasteia, or temples of the imperial cult, and were carefully designed to project specific ideas about the emperor, his family, and his authority. These sculptures were extremely useful as propaganda tools intended to support the legitimacy of the emperor's powers. Two of the most influential, and most widely disseminated, media for imperial portraits were coins and sculpture, and official types laden with propagandistic connotation were dispersed throughout the empire to announce and identify the imperial authority. Scholars believe that official portrait types were created in the capital city of Rome itself and distributed to the provinces to serve as prototypes for local workshops, which could adapt them to conform to local iconographic traditions and therefore have more meaningful local appeal. Coins by their very nature are easily and quickly dispersed, reaching countless citizens and provincial residents, and thus the emperor's image could be seen and his power recognized by people all across the vast empire. \^/

“Conversely, in the instance of the "bad" emperors such as Nero and Domitian, whose reigns were characterized by destructive behavior and who were posthumously condemned by the Senate, imperial portraits were sometimes recycled or even destroyed. Typical effects of a damnatio memoriae, a modern term for the most severe denunciation, included the erasure of an individual's name from public inscriptions, and even assault on their portraits as if brought against the subject himself. Imperial portraits of "bad" emperors were also removed from public view and warehoused, often later recycled into portraits of private individuals or emperors of the following decades. A recarved portrait is relatively easy to recognize; certain features such as a disproportionate hairline or unusually flattened ears are typical signs that a bust had been altered from an earlier likeness.”

Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle

According to the Metropolitan Museum of Art: “The development of Roman portraiture is characterized by a stylistic cycle that alternately emphasized realistic or idealizing elements. Each stage of Roman portraiture can be described as alternately "veristic" or "classicizing," as each imperial dynasty sought to emphasize certain aspects of representation in an effort to legitimize their authority or align themselves with revered predecessors. These stylistic stages played off of one another while pushing the medium toward future artistic innovations. [Source: Rosemarie Trentinella, Department of Greek and Roman Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, October 2003, metmuseum.org \^/]

Tiberius

“In the Republic, the most highly valued traits included a devotion to public service and military prowess, and so Republican citizens sought to project these ideals through their representation in portraiture. Public officials commissioned portrait busts that reflected every wrinkle and imperfection of the skin, and heroic, full-length statues often composed of generic bodies onto which realistic, called "veristic", portrait heads were attached. The overall effect of this style gave Republican ideals physical form and presented an image that the sitter wanted to express. \^/

“Beginning with Augustus, the emperors of the imperial period made full use of the medium's potential as a tool for communicating specific ideologies to the Roman populace. Augustus' official portrait type was disseminated throughout the empire and combined the heroicizing idealization of Hellenistic art with Republican ideas of individual likeness to produce a whole new scheme for portraiture that was at once innovative and yet fundamentally based in familiar aspects of traditional Roman art. Augustan and Julio-Claudian portrait types emphasized the youth, beauty, and benevolence of the new dynastic family, and in doing so, Augustus set a stylistic precedent that had lasting impact on Roman portrait sculpture up to the reign of Constantine the Great. \^/

“Classicizing idealization in portraiture allowed emperors to emphasize their loyalties to the imperial dynasty, and even legitimize their authority by visually linking themselves to their predecessors. Tiberius (r. 14–37 A.D.) was not actually related to Augustus, but his portraits portray a remarkable, and fictionalized, resemblance that connected him to the princeps and helped substantiate his position as successor. Even Tiberius' successor Caligula (r. 37–41 A.D.), who had no interest in continuing Augustus' administrative ideals and was much more concerned with promoting his own agenda, followed the Augustan and Tiberian portrait tradition of classical and idealized features that carried a strong "family" resemblance. However, during the reign of the emperor Claudius (r. 41–54 A.D.), a shift in the political atmosphere favored a return to Republican standards and so also influenced artistic styles. Portraits of Claudius reflect his increasing age and strongly resemble veristic portraits of the Republic. This trend toward realism eventually led to the characteristic styles of the second imperial dynasty: the Flavians. \^/

Marcus Aurelius

“The turbulence of the year 68/69 A.D., which saw the rise and fall of three different emperors, instigated drastic changes in Roman portraiture characterized by a return to a veristic representation that emphasized their military strengths. Portraits of Vespasian (r. 69–79 A.D.), the founder of the Flavian dynasty, similarly show him in an unidealized manner. During the Flavian era, sculptors also made remarkable advancements in technique that included a revolutionary use of the drill, and female portraiture of the period is renowned for its elaborate corkscrew hairstyles. \^/

“The cycle continued with the portraits of Trajan (r. 98–117 A.D.), who wanted to emphasize symbolic connections with Augustus and so adopted an ageless and somewhat idealized portrait type quite different from that of the Flavians. His successor Hadrian (r. 117–38 A.D.), however, went a step further and is noted as being the first emperor to adopt the Greek habit of wearing a beard. The textual interplay that was developed in the treatment of Flavian women's hairstyles was now more fully explored in male portraiture, and busts of the Hadrianic period are identified by a full head of curly hair as well as the presence of a beard. The Antonines modeled their portraits after Hadrian, and emphasized (fictional) familial resemblances to him by having themselves portrayed as never-aging, bearded adults. Continued development in Roman portrait styles was spurred by the philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius (r. 161–80 A.D.) and his son Commodus (r. 177–92 A.D.), whose portraits feature new levels of psychological expression that reflect changes not only in the emperors' physical state but their mental condition as well. These physical embodiments of personality and emotional expression later reach their fullest realization in the portraits of the Severan emperor Caracalla (r. 211–17 A.D.). \^/

“In contrast to the full curls typical of Hadrianic and Antonine portraits, Caracalla is shown with a short, military beard and hairstyle that were stippled across the surface of the marble for a "buzz-cut" effect, also called "negative carving." He is also shown with an intense, almost insane facial expression, which evokes his strong military background and, according to some scholars, reflects his aggressive nature. This portrait type is credited as having a profound effect on imperial portraiture in the turbulent years to follow his reign, and many of the soldier-emperors of the third century sought to legitimize their rise to power by stylistically aligning themselves with Caracalla. As time went on, these stylized aspects became increasingly prominent, and soon a pronounced attention to geometry and emotional anxiety permeated imperial portrait sculptures, as evident in the bronze statue of Trebonianus Gallus. \^/

Constantine

"This increasing dependency on geometric symmetry and abstraction contributed to the highly distinctive portraiture utilized by the Tetrarchy, a system of imperial rule based on a foundation of indivisibility and homogeneous authority shared by four co-emperors. The portraits of these Tetrarchs emphasized an abstract and stylized communal image; individualized features were forsaken in order to present them as the embodiment of a united empire. This message sought to quell the fears and anxieties born out of years of civil strife and short-lived emperors, and so in this extreme example, the portraiture of the Tetrarchy cannot be defined as the representation of individuals, but rather as the manufactured image of their revolutionary political system. \^/

“The portraiture of Constantine the Great, who defeated his rivals to become sole emperor in 326 A.D., is unique in its combination of third-century abstraction and a neo-Augustan, neo-Trajanic classical revival. Constantine favored dynastic succession and used the homogeneous precedents of his predecessors to present his sons as his apparent heirs. However, he also sought to imbue his reign with aspects of the "good" emperor Trajan, and is depicted clean-shaven and sporting the short, comma-shaped hairstyle typical of that emperor. He further disassociated himself from the Tetrarchs and soldier-emperors by having himself portrayed as youthful and serene, recalling the classicizing idealism of Augustan and Julio-Claudian portraits. In this way, Constantine's portraiture encapsulated the Roman artistic tradition of emulation and innovation, and in turn had great impact on the development of Byzantine art.”

Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons, The Louvre, The British Museum

Text Sources: Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Rome sourcebooks.fordham.edu ; Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Late Antiquity sourcebooks.fordham.edu ; “Outlines of Roman History” by William C. Morey, Ph.D., D.C.L. New York, American Book Company (1901) ; “The Private Life of the Romans” by Harold Whetstone Johnston, Revised by Mary Johnston, Scott, Foresman and Company (1903, 1932); BBC Ancient Rome bbc.co.uk/history/ ; Project Gutenberg gutenberg.org ; Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Geographic, Smithsonian magazine, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Live Science, Discover magazine, Archaeology magazine, Reuters, Associated Press, The Guardian, AFP, The New Yorker, Wikipedia, Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopedia.com and various other books, websites and publications.

Last updated November 2024