Mutable, Flexible, Fluid: Papyrus Drawings for Textiles and Replication in Roman Art

Abstract

There is a relatively unexplored corpus of papyrus drawings made for and used by artisans engaged in the production of textiles in late Roman Egypt. The intentional indeterminacy in such sketches enabled both artistic flexibility and replicative (if not mass) production. An understanding of their employment in the fabrication of items both functional and decorative bears on far-reaching questions concerning replication, aesthetics, and artistic agency in Roman art generally, as well as on our understanding of the concept of the schema in the history of art.