Introduction

Abstract

Abstract Almost every handbook of Roman art contains, in the section dealing with the art of the Roman Republic, an illustration of the ‘Pseudo-Athlete’ from Delos (Pl. 1) or the ‘Tivoli General’ (Pl. 2). Partly for this reason, one supposes, these are two of the best known of all Roman statues. What is not so well known is that these works are not isolated creations of the late Republic, but are merely two representative examples of a whole genre of Roman portraiture. Such figures were produced by setting a ‘realistic’—and in many cases rather elderly—Roman portrait head directly on to the nude (or semi-nude) ‘ideal’ kind of body normally used for representations of Classical Greek gods, heroes, or athletes. Hence the Delian portrait’s popular sobriquet—the ‘Pseudo-Athlete’. Portrait figures of this type continued to be produced in considerable numbers under the empire, right down to the end of the third century ad and the coming of Christianity; and more than 340 examples have come down to us, most of them over-lifesize, some colossal. By any standards, this constitutes a large and impressive corpus of ancient sculpture; but, despite their numbers, such works have traditionally received little notice in histories of Roman art.