NEITHER COPIES NOR ORIGINALS: HELLENISTIC AND ROMAN IDEAL SCULPTURES RECONSIDERED

Hellenistic and Roman ideal sculptures – expertly crafted, prominently displayed, and far from uniform – were central to ancient material culture. Previous scholars have described the sculptures as copies of lost Greek monuments, or alternatively as “Roman originals” with few ties to the Hellenic past. Building on recent scholarship concerning the Roman transformation of Greek sculpture, I have shown how in ancient society these images were pervasive, varied, and creative in relation to their Greek models. At the same time, they were meaningful to viewers precisely because of their familiar character and their evocation of a revered Hellenic tradition. This more nuanced analysis represents a challenge to previous interpretations of the sculptures as, on the one hand, straightforwardly derivative or, on the other, “original” and comprehensible in purely Roman terms.

My method of approach – tracking the evolution of a major sculptural type – offers an approach to classicism in Roman culture that differs from earlier scholarship in three important ways. First, it provides a succinct, clearly defined “test case” for assessing the validity of previous hypotheses concerning the derivative or, alternatively, original character of Roman ideal sculpture. Second, it offers a more comprehensive perspective than those that focus on bodies of material defined by style, context, or genre.