Debunking the Copy Myth
Roman sculptors did not just imitate Greek masters; they produced beautiful, original works in their own right.
043
Who would think that a marble statue weighing more than a ton could be invisible? Yet that is the fate of hundreds of Roman statues in museums all over the world. Huge, white and shiny, they line galleries of classical art, but no one ever sees them. Their labels make them invisible.
Each is identified as a “Roman copy of a Greek original.” The labels usually give the date, too: “Roman copy of a fourth-century [or fifth-century] Greek work.” Sometimes they even name the Greek artist: “Roman copy of a work by Praxiteles”—or Phidias, or Scopas, or Lysippus. Rarely do the labels have anything to say about the work that is in front of you; it is hardly ever dated, and the artist’s name is almost never given. These Roman statues are simply imagined as lenses through which we can dimly perceive Greek beauty. This is a myth that has bedeviled students of classical art for 200 years, leading to a misunderstanding of Roman and Greek sculpture.
Outside of a small (but ever-growing) group of specialists, the 19th-century view that the originality of Roman sculptors was confined to portraits and historical reliefs still dominates the thinking of art historians and classicists. Most scholars think that works like the delectable second-century C.E. bronze portrait of an unknown woman in the Worcester Art Museum, or Rome’s Column of Trajan, with its vivid scenes of the conquest of Dacia on the Danube river, represent the ultimate creative achievements of Roman sculptors. Most people believe that the originality of Roman sculpture lies in 044its depiction of the here and now, the visible world. But when it came to figures from the invisible world—gods, goddesses, mythical characters—the Romans simply copied existing Greek works, or so the argument goes. And they continued to do little else for more than 300 years! Very few works depicting these subjects are considered to be original creations. When wealthy Romans decided to decorate public buildings or private villas with statues of gods or mythical beings, they just chose from a repertory of copies of famous statues carved by earlier classical or Hellenistic geniuses. The blame for this artistic stagnation has been placed both on Roman artists, whom many modern art historians deem “creatively challenged,” and on their patrons. The art buyers are thought to have had such a strong preference for copies of the Greek masters that artists could not sell original works. Why buy an original Nobody when you can have a flawless Praxiteles, even if it’s a copy?
This (mistaken) view of Roman sculptural practice was devised by 19th-century scholars, who used the tastes and production methods of their own day as a model for ancient Rome. In the late 18th and 19th centuries, universities, art schools, museums and private houses were filled with plaster casts of statues by ancient and Renaissance masters. It was all too easy for scholars to believe that the Romans, too, had filled their establishments with copies of works by classical and Hellenistic masters. The trouble was, of course, that they forgot how much modern sculpture was being created all around them—much of it, like Roman sculpture, in a Greek style.
One reason our Victorian forebears were so eager to accept the notion that Roman sculptures were copies of Greek ones was their own love for all things Greek. They 045could not bear to think that the great works of ancient Greek masters were irretrievably lost. The hypothesis that these works had survived in copies allowed everyone to believe that the loss was not total: The inspired carvings of Polyclitus, Praxiteles and Scopas could still be seen—if only in careful copies by Roman artisans.a
It is true that Roman sculptors used plaster casts to make extremely accurate copies of famous works. Some of the casts have survived, and some bronze statues show marks where casts were made. However, it is a logical error to conclude from the proposition “some statues were copies” that all statues were copies. Our 18th- and 19th-century predecessors exaggerated both their number and importance. Drawing inferences from a few known replicas, they dreamed up a whole industry devoted to little else.
They also assumed that the preparation and training of sculptors and the definition of what it means to be an artist were the same in antiquity as in their own day. For example, in the 18th and 19th centuries there was a gap between the artist, who conceived of a statue, and the artisan, who executed it. Instead of honing their skills as stonecutters and mastering the intricacies of the medium, aspiring sculptors were subjected to strict academic training in formal art academies. They progressed through carefully structured exercises that included repeated drawing of canonical works, in large part plaster casts of classical statuary. Most of them finished their own statuary simply as clay or plaster models that they turned over to professional marble workers, who carved the finished product. Even today the tradition of relying on professional carvers to complete statuary is far from 046dead. Many such workshops are still in operation in Italy, where skilled craftsmen produce copies of statues in any material, size or style.
This kind of organization of the art industry, however, was completely foreign to the Romans. They never separated artists from marble carvers and had no tradition of academic art education. A marmorarius, or marble worker, could be a simple mason, a shop-sign maker or the favorite sculptor of the imperial court. Sculptors were trained informally in workshops, learning their craft as apprentices to master artists. There is no reason to believe that there were sculptors specially trained as copyists who were set apart from creative artists.
Consider this, too: Would it even have been possible for most Roman patrons to commission copies of ancient Greek statues? Art purchasers cannot demand that a replica be exact unless they know exactly what the original looks like. In the late 18th and 19th centuries, the art-buying public—schooled first by books of engravings and later by photographs—had the means of becoming familiar with ancient statuary. We modern students of art have a kind of mental Rolodex of familiar images filed in our brains (Michelangelo’s David, for example), and we flip through it for comparisons when confronting a work of art for the first time. When we visit a museum today, we buy posters or at least postcards of the works we especially like. We collect art books and strew our coffee tables with lavishly illustrated catalogues.
The Romans, however, who had neither the printing press nor paper, never developed any such habits. They did have the means to make three-dimensional replicas, and some sculptors, with their plaster casts of statuary, would no doubt have been able to recognize true copies. It is not clear, however, that many of their patrons could have done so. For example, only those who had actually traveled to Knidos, an island just off the Aegean coast of Turkey, and seen Praxiteles’s marble Aphrodite would have been able to distinguish between a meticulously accurate copy and a work that just resembled her.
Nor, finally, is there any reason to assume that the few Romans who could recognize a faithful copy of an original ancient masterpiece would have preferred one. The preferences of Roman connoisseurs seem to have been quite different. When we look at other kinds of Roman art—architecture, painting, the luxury arts (never relegated by the ancients to the “minor” arts)—and even at Roman literature, we can get a pretty clear picture of how the Romans handled their debt to their Greek predecessors—and it is not the pattern imagined for Roman sculpture.
All Roman art depends to some extent on Greek art. The subjects, the styles and the media of Roman artists were all derived from Greek precedents. In all the arts apart from sculpture, however, there are very few exact copies. What we see instead are creative adaptations. Roman architecture, for instance, is closely patterned on Greek architecture. Materials, designs, styles (marble, pediments, columns)—all are taken straight from Greece. Nevertheless, any student taking an introductory survey course can distinguish the late-first-century B.C.E. Roman Maison Carrée (in Nîmes, France) from the fifth-century B.C.E. Greek Hephaisteion (near Athens’s agora) by its high podium, engaged columns, deep porch and other details of design and construction. Roman temples are inconceivable without their Greek predecessors, but they remain distinctly Roman.
In painting, the Romans borrowed Greek subjects and quoted from Greek works but painted them on elaborately frescoed walls. In some cases, the Greek elements are deliberately set apart as a kind of conceit, with fictive “paintings” hung on the walls and framed with fictive architecture. They seem to advertise their artificiality. These elaborately painted walls, moreover, by appropriating a wide range of styles and subjects, and including Egyptian elements along with 047classical ones, proclaim the triumph of the Roman Empire.1
The luxury arts of goldsmithing, jewelry making and gem engraving are perhaps the most Greek of all Roman arts. The same materials, the same techniques and the same styles continue in use. Distinguishing between Greek and Roman examples is often a judgment call. Viewers admiring a magnificent Roman gem like the cameo of Icarus and Daedalus (see photo of cameo of Icarus and Daedalus), however, don’t go looking for a “lost Greek original.” Everyone recognizes the fact that the cameo is the creation of a Roman artist who openly acknowledged an artistic debt to Greek predecessors.
The word “debt,” in fact, is not the right term. We are looking not at a borrowing but at an unbroken tradition, an uninterrupted sequence of masters and apprentices passing on a set of techniques and ideas from generation to generation. This is clearly seen if we compare two metal vessels: a Greek-style golden rhyton (in the Archaeological Museum, in Plovdiv, Bulgaria) and a Roman silver gilt cup (in Copenhagen’s National Museum of Denmark). The Greek example dates to the fourth century B.C.E., the Roman from the first century C.E., but the continuity between the two vessels is clear. The Roman cup, which depicts Priam kneeling before Achilles, 050has made Achilles look suspiciously like the Emperor Augustus. Once again, the Roman artist is proclaiming his appropriation of the Greek past and is preaching an imperial message: Barbarians kneel to Romans.
The same is true of Roman literature. Of course there are literal translations into Latin from Greek, but they are surprisingly rare. Much more common and more highly valued by Roman readers were creative adaptations. In all genres, from epic to lyric, philosophical essay to drama, Roman readers expected and Roman writers produced transformed versions of Greek works. The Aeneid, for example, is inconceivable without Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey as models, but it is supremely Roman. The Latin poems of Catullus and Horace treat Greek themes in Greek meters; the comedies of Plautus ( perfectly captured in the movie A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum) echo the Greek playwright Menander. In literature as well as the visual arts, the Romans delighted their audiences by mixing the old and the new, the ancient and the up-to-date.
Sculpture has always been considered an exception. Sculptors are imagined to have played by different rules—to have been copyists rather than creative adapters, technicians rather than artists. Why should this be true? Why should they be different from other Roman artists? Why should we look to the 19th century for a model of what sculptors and patrons wanted? Shouldn’t we look instead at other contemporaneous Roman artists and their patrons? Surely the tastes and interests of the Romans themselves provide a better guide to the behavior of Roman sculptors than do 19th-century tastes and interests.
Praxiteles’s great fourth-century B.C.E. statue of Aphrodite offers an excellent example of the innovative transformations performed by Roman artists. Praxiteles carved the nude goddess for the Anatolian city of Knidos. According to the Roman historian Pliny the Elder (c. 23–79 B.C.E.), she became so celebrated that King Nicomedes of Bithynia is said to have offered to pay off the city’s public debt (which we are assured was enormous) if the city fathers would sell her to him. Wisely, Pliny reports, they refused to do so, for “with that statue Praxiteles made Knidos famous.”2
Not only did the statue make Knidos famous, but its fame, in turn, told Romans what Aphrodite looked like. The easiest way 051to make a recognizable image of Aphrodite was to make it look like Praxiteles’s conception of her. The original statue is lost, but fortunately in the Roman period the Knidians put her image on coins, so we can see what she looked like. She was represented as undressing to take a bath, dropping her robe on a water jar. A Roman marble version in the Vatican seems, if we can believe the coin, to be a pretty straightforward copy. Another version in Munich, however, shows the changes that Roman artists made: This time the goddess is not dropping her drapery but pulling it up. Startled while removing her clothes, and now aware that she is being watched, Aphrodite is embarrassed. So she hastily begins to cover herself.
The formal change is minimal, with the hand lifting instead of dropping the folds of fabric. But this simple change completely transforms the relationship between viewer and statue. In the Vatican version the goddess is merely “there,” a marble sculpture without consciousness. In the Munich statue she becomes dynamic, reacting to a situation as any human being might. In fact, she is reacting to us, the viewers; we are the ones who see her nakedness and cause her embarrassment.
This creative tension between the viewer and the work of art, and the “selfconsciousness” of the statue, are typical of the games that late Hellenistic and Roman writers played with their readers, but they are not typical of fourth-century artists or writers. This new Roman theme of startled modesty became very popular in depictions of Aphrodite. We find it prominently on display in the Capitoline Venus, for example, in which the goddess very selfconsciously covers her breasts and pubes with her hands.
We are a long way from a copy here. We are in a world familiar from Roman architecture, painting and luxury arts. We are in the world of Roman poetry. We are also at the beginning of a long series of Western art works executed “after the antique.” The Romans were only the first of many generations of artists who made the art of the past their subject. These Roman variations on a theme by Praxiteles initiate a tradition of the remaking of ancient masterworks that is still continuing. Like their modern successors, the Roman carvers were artists, not technicians—and they made works of art, not mechanical copies. They deserve to be recognized and named.
Who would think that a marble statue weighing more than a ton could be invisible? Yet that is the fate of hundreds of Roman statues in museums all over the world. Huge, white and shiny, they line galleries of classical art, but no one ever sees them. Their labels make them invisible. Each is identified as a “Roman copy of a Greek original.” The labels usually give the date, too: “Roman copy of a fourth-century [or fifth-century] Greek work.” Sometimes they even name the Greek artist: “Roman copy of a work by Praxiteles”—or Phidias, or Scopas, or Lysippus. Rarely […]
You have already read your free article for this month. Please join the BAS Library or become an All Access member of BAS to gain full access to this article and so much more.
Already a library member? Log in here.
Institution user? Log in with your IP address or Username
Footnotes
No works of the late-fifth-century B.C.E. sculptor Polyclitus have survived; in Roman times, however, he was famous as the sculptor of the Doryphorus (the spear-bearer), much imitated by Roman sculptors. The fourth-century B.C.E. Athenian sculptor Praxiteles’s works include the Aphrodite of Knidos and the altar of the Artemision in Ephesus (neither work has survived). Scopas, a fourth-century B.C.E. sculptor from the island of Paros, designed the Temple of Athena at Tegea, not far from Sparta.