Roman sculpture

The Pantheon is quintessentially Roman. But the Emperor Hadrian, to whom its design has sometimes been attributed, displayed more eclectic tastes in his enormous, rambling imperial residence outside Rome - Hadrian's Villa near Tivoli. A philhellene who spoke Greek better than Latin and preferred Athens to Rome, Hadrian furnished the villa throughout with Greek statues. Several hundred, perhaps as many as 1,000, survive in fragments now scattered among the museums of the world. They are mainly copies or variants of Classical Greek or Hellenistic figures or groups. The only original works seem to have been portraits of Hadrian himself and his favourite Antinous, a youth from Asia Minor who was mysteriously drowned in the Nile in AD 130 and promptly numbered among the gods. Images of Antinous, set up all over the empire, were, however, more often than not pastiches in which earlier statues of Hermes, Dionysus or other gods were combined with heads portraying the youth's sultry and often rather sulky good looks (5,52).

In his obsession with Greek sculpture Hadrian followed a long and well-established tradition. Romans had begun to collect Greek statues before the end of the third century BC, and after Greece was absorbed into the Roman empire as the province of Achaia in 146 BC the flow of Greek sculptures westwards was continuous. The sanctuary at Delphi alone is said to have been robbed of some 500 statues. Even so, the demand in Rome far exceeded the supply. In letter after letter Cicero, for example, implored a friend who was living in Athens to procure sculpture for him. He was building a country house near present-day Frascati, a few miles outside Rome, and needed some sculpture to adorn it. A great deal of sculpture was bought in this way as 'furniture pieces' and was doubtless produced specifically for this market - hence the proliferation of copies and imitations and their usually rather poor quality. (It is on these shaky foundations, it should be remembered, that much of our knowledge of Classical Greek sculpture rests.) They were mostly produced in Greece - either in Athens itself, the Greek islands or the Greek cities on the coast of Asia Minor - or by immigrant Greek artists in Rome. Sometimes these sculptors seem to have worked from casts with the aid of pointing apparatus (see Glossary). But they had no respect for either medium or scale. Bronzes were reproduced in marble, with the addition of unsightly supports as a result, and scale was adjusted arbitrarily to suit the decorative demands of the purchasers. Statues were even copied in reverse to make up pairs. A mid-fourth-century BC statue by Skopas, which, Pliny tells us, was 'worshipped with extremely sacred ceremonies at Samothrace', was duplicated in this way to fill balancing niches in a Roman house of the imperial period. There could hardly be a more telling instance of the transformation of a Greek devotional image into a luxury ornament.

It is seldom known how faithfully a marble of the imperial period reproduces an earlier original (the caryatids from Hadrian's Villa and from the Forum of Augustus are the only Roman copies that can be compared with the still surviving originals), and there is reason to believe that some were essays in earlier styles rather than copies - including two of the most famous of all, the Apollo Belvedere (5,5) and the Laocoon (5,53). The latter derives stylistically from the relief of similarly straining muscular figures with tortured faces on the frieze of the Altar of Zeus from Pergamum (5,17) and was for long regarded as a copy after a lost work of that period. That it is an original work of the first century AD is strongly suggested by the recent discovery (at Sperlonga, south of Rome) of very similar groups signed by the three sculptors to whom Pliny attributed the Laocoon, and almost certainly carved expressly for a grotto used as a banqueting hall by the Emperor Tiberius (AD 14-37). The incident represented by the Laocoon is not recorded in Greek literature in just this form; the earliest known source for it is the greatest of all Latin poems, Virgil's patriotically Roman Aeneid (written c. 27-20 BC), where Laocoon appears as the Trojan priest who warned his fellow countrymen against admitting the wooden horse of the Greeks into their city. While he was sacrificing a bull to Poseidon, Virgil relates, two serpents swam out of the sea, coiled round him and his sons and killed them. As the Romans believed themselves to be descended from the Trojans, the heroic suffering of Laocoon had special significance for them. The priest and his sons are at once figures from the mythical prehistory of Rome and symbols of human fortitude in a struggle against malign, incomprehensible supernatural forces. In turning to Hellenistic art for inspiration, however, the three sculptors, who came from Rhodes, introduced a declamatory sensationalism, both technical and emotional, which ill accords with the dignity, restraint and gravity of the Aeneid.

If Roman cultural dependence on Greece was evident even in a major original work like the Laocoon, which stood in the imperial palace when Pliny saw it, it became quite blatant in the practice of making full-length portrait statues by the simple expedient of adding a portrait head to a body copied direct from a Greek original. The bodies were produced independently and could be bought, as it were, from stock. A variety of poses and types and sizes were available to choose from, each with a socket in the neck so that a portrait head could be attached. How prevalent the practice was - and how indifferent the Romans were to its demeaning implications - is shown by its use for prominent imperial portraits, though sometimes, it is true, with such latitude that the resulting image has the force of an original conception. The statue of Augustus, which originally stood outside the imperial villa at Primaporta near Rome, is the best known of these (3,54). For it the famous Doryphorus (4,34), an accepted exemplar of ideal male proportions, was treated more freely than usual, almost, in fact, as if it were a tailor's dummy. Not only the portrait head but a Roman general's costume was added as well, including the cuirass crisply carved with allegorical figures probably alluding to the diplomatic victory over the Parthians in 20 BC. Adjustments were also made to the pose, notably by raising the right arm to a speaking gesture. By these means a highly idealized statue of an anonymous nude athlete was transformed into an image of imperial power personified by Augustus, a Greek model into what seems to be a characteristically Roman work of propagandist art - though it may well have been carved by a sculptor of Greek origin.