The Modern Problem of Roman “Copies”

Mouseion. Series III. Vol. 4 (2004) 345-364©2004 Mouseion REVIEW ARTICLE / COMPTE RENDU CRITIQUE THE MODERN PROBLEM OF ROMAN "COPIES "I JANE FRANCIS Every student of Classical Archaeology has been confronted at some point with images of ancient marble sculptures that are said to be Roman copies of now-lost bronze Greek originals. These art works have been valued primarily for the information they are thought to provide about their Greek prototypes: style. composition, pose, and overall appearance . Multiple versions of the same statue are subjected to a comparative analysis called Kopienkritik, wherein individual works are diluted to their greater common denominators, namely the elements thought to have been present in the originals. Any references in ancient literature, mostly Roman, to Greek artists, their sculptures, themes, and circumstances of artistic creation are matched to extant works in an effort to provide attributions, and much of what is known about the history of Greek sculpture is derived from this process. For iIlstance, Pliny mentions that the artist Lysippos made a statue of an athlete destringens se (Nat. 34.62). This reference is matched to the statue-type called the Apoxyomenos. and its style and composition said to exemplify that of Lysippos and trends of the late fourth century B.C.. upon which hang attributions and dates for other sculptures. The concept of Meisterforschung. or association with a master, has a long history. going back to the middle of the eighteenth century when Winckelmann insisted on the artistic supremacy and aesthetic dominance of Greek art over ROlnan (1755 and 1764). The invention of Kopienkritik a century later led to an explosion of its application, and it soon became the aim of scholarship to attach an artist's name to every sculpture (Furtwangler [1893]). This practice continues today (Moon [1995]: Beck and Bol [1993]), despite obvious problems. First, many of the texts on which attributions and descriptions of sculptures are based are corrupt or vague passages, some with only one or two letters of the artist's I Elaine K. Gazda, ed.. The Ancient Art of Emulation. Studies in Artistic Originality and Tradition from the Present to Llassical Antiquity. Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome. Supplementary Vol. I. Ann Arbor 2002. Pp. xiv + 300. ISBN 0-472-11189-2. In this review. the term "copy" is used without prejudice to refer to the body of sculpture made by the Romans in Greek and/ or theme. 345 346 JANE FRANCIS name preserved, as in the case of the so-called Crouching Aphrodite by Doidalsas, where the preserved sesededalsa (Plin. Nat. 36.35) has been incorrectly translated into Doidalsas (Linfert [1969]; Francis [2002]); the desire to discern a master's identity sometimes overrides the true nature of the evidence. Second, Kopienkritik looks only for what is most "Greek" about a sculpture, with all deviations from this, including Roman aspects, devalued and ignored as errors of replication or ignorance about the original. Third, no Greek prototype can be proven, except in a few cases: the versions of the Erechtheion caryatids in the attic of the Forum of Augustus at Rome and at Hadrian's villa at Tivoli can be directly compared against their late-fifth-century models from the Athenian Akropolis (Lauter [1976]; Schmidt [1982]). In the majority of sculptures , however, the existence of the original is pure speculation. The first half of the twentieth century saw numerous explorations of copying, most notably by Lippold (1923). In the 1960s and 1970s, however , several scholars challenged Meisterforschung and looked for other ways of understanding copies. Key to this process was the development of scholarship on Roman decor and increased knowledge about the mindset and role of the Roman patron. This provided copies with a Roman cultural context and aesthetic appreciation they had not had perhaps since their own day (Vermeule [1966] and [1977]; Ridgway [1970]). Studies occurred on the use of statuary in private villas (Pandermalis [1971]; Dwyer [1982]; Kreeb [1984]; and Neudecker [1988]), public buildings like theaters (Manderscheid [1981]; Fuchs [1982]) and baths (Marvin [1983]); gardens (Hill [1981]): and imperial palaces (Raeder [1983]). All of these contributed to a growing picture of what the Romans thought about sculpture in Greek style or theme. Greek...