Portrait Statues Research Articles

Ancient Greek Portrait Sculpture. Contexts, Subjects, and Styles (review)

Reviewed by: Ancient Greek Portrait Sculpture. Contexts, Subjects, and Styles Catherine M. Keesling Sheila Dillon . Ancient Greek Portrait Sculpture. Contexts, Subjects, and Styles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Pp. xvii + 217. Cloth (ISBN 0-521-85498-9) US$ 95.00. The book under review, a revised version of Dillon's 1994 Institute of Fine Arts dissertation, promises a timely English-language treatment of the evidence for the portrait statues of ancient Greece, as they were and as they lived on in Roman copies made for Roman contexts. It is neither a comprehensive study of ancient Greek portrait sculpture, nor an introductory survey, as the title might lead us to expect. What the book does offer, however, is a creative study centered on what can be inferred about the lost art of Greek portraiture from a catalogue of 108 portraits of unknown Greek subjects, most of them Roman "copies" executed in a Classical or Hellenistic Greek style by unknown sculptors, presumably working for Roman patrons. The result is a sharply focused contribution of sophistication and insight, equipped with dense narrative footnotes. While acknowledging the importance of Gisela Richter's three-volume 1965 catalogue The Portraits of the Greeks as a foundation and a resource (it is now available in a revised one-volume version edited by R.R.R. Smith), Dillon at the same time rightly observes that Richter's principal of reconstructing lost Greek bronze portraits of famous men has limited the scope of inquiry into whom Greek portraits really represented, what they looked like, and what both the Greeks and the Romans did with them. Though some of the Greek "anonymi" whose portrait images are surveyed here probably did represent famous subjects, we have no way of [End Page 312] knowing who they were because the Roman versions did not include inscribed name labels. More surprisingly, perhaps, Dillon argues against the approach of Paul Zanker in his Sather Lectures (published as The Mask of Socrates: The Image of the Intellectual in Antiquity [Berkeley/Los Angeles 1995]). In Dillon's view, Zanker is wrong to conclude that the Greek sculptors of the Classical period tried to make their portraits look alike, in the interest of presenting all male portrait subjects as illustrations of the ideal citizen. He also puts too much faith in our ability to arrive at precise stylistic dates for either the lost Greek originals or their Roman marble copies. Dillon, basing her observations upon careful autopsy of the material in her catalogue, demonstrates a willingness to move beyond these two approaches to Greek portraiture, which arguably have far more to do with what modern scholarship would like Greek portraiture to have been than what the realia (bronze originals, inscribed statue bases, and Roman marble copies) show it to be. After the introductory chapter laying out the author's goals, Chapters 2 and 3, "Making Portraits of the Greeks" and "Displaying Portraits of the Greeks," approach Greek portraits in what may seem like reverse order, by starting with what we know of them from Roman copies and contexts; in fact, this is a more honest method than traditional approaches, in which claims are made about Greek portraiture while trying to acknowledge as little as possible the role of Roman evidence. Dillon first illustrates through three detailed case studies her approach to the typological and stylistic grouping of anonymous portrait heads in marble. After a brief consideration of what we know about Hellenistic Greek portrait galleries (very little indeed), Dillon proceeds to single out the collections of Greek portraits displayed in two Roman villas for closer analysis. The large collection of portraits of 36 Greek subjects in the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum may have been atypical in its subject selection, with several one-of-a-kind portraits and some portrait subjects that still cannot be identified. The collection of portrait herms from the Villa of Cassius at Tivoli, on the other hand, showed a marked preference for portraits of the most popular Classical Greek subjects, but the different formats of the herms in the collection suggest that it was built up of pieces acquired at different times and from different sources. The selection of portrait subjects in...

Prostitutes and Courtesans in the Ancient World (review)

Reviewed by: Prostitutes and Courtesans in the Ancient World Madeleine M. Henry Christopher A. Faraone and Laura K. McClure , eds. Prostitutes and Courtesans in the Ancient World. Wisconsin Studies in Classics. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006. x + 360 pp. Cloth, $65; paper, 24.95. This collection stems from a conference at the University of Wisconsin, Madison in April 2002. McClure's introduction situates the essays historically from nineteenth-century assemblages of textual references to sexual practice to the present, when attention to prostitution has grown out of interest in women's history, the history of sexuality, and cultural studies. She notes important modern approaches and the vexed question of terminology and its relationship to behavior. As McClure states, "while prostitutes in the ancient world may have been socially marginal, they were symbolically and even socially central" (6). Most of the essays, organized into three categories, concentrate on written evidence; some may wish that illustrations had been included. Section A: "Prostitution and the Sacred" In "Marriage, Divorce, and the Prostitute in Ancient Mesopotamia," Martha Roth concentrates on the impact, especially on marriage, of unmarried women (harı\mtu in Babylono-Assyrian, kar.kid in Sumerian) who had sexual relations with men. She concludes that the documents assign responsibility to the unmarried woman who has sexual relations with a man and that the law codes attempted to prevent or minimize the economic repercussions of such unions on inheritance. Roth finds no evidence of "ritualized or institutionalized sexual intercourse" (23) in Old Babylonian evidence (nineteenth to seventeenth centuries B.C.E.). In "Prostitution in the Social World and Religious Rhetoric of Ancient Israel," Phyllis Bird mainly provides interpretations of references in the Hebrew Bible to prostitution (e.g., the quest for "oriental sacred prostitution") and surveys elite, male religious biases. The prostitute "type" of the Hebrew Bible resembles that of surrounding cultures (41). Bird disentangles the considerable metaphorical uses of prostitutional language from other more literal references in order to concentrate on the differences between one called a prostitute proper (zonah, one who engages in extramarital sexual relations) versus one called qedes=ah ("consecrated woman"). The verb zanah referred to all extramarital sexual relations except adultery, and Bird dissects the problems involved when no one English word can be used to cover the range of meanings that the Hebrew root ZNH carries: raped women are defined by the same word, as are women who lure men [End Page 419] into adultery. In each instance, "an unmarried woman is involved in a sexual act" (45). The city can be personified as a prostitute or bride, and prostitutes symbolize dishonor in narrative texts. ZNH and its derivatives describe illicit political activity and describe Israel herself as a fornicating woman. Bird finds no evidence that prostitution was illegal in ancient Israel; the abundant references to and metaphorical uses of terms derived from ZNH suggest strongly that prostitutes were a feature of life, without establishing that females might engage in prostitution in order to pay religious fines. Bird notes briefly that male prostitution in ancient Israel was homosexual and had its own terminology (49). In "Heavenly Bodies: Monuments to Prostitutes in Greek Sanctuaries," Catherine Keesling examines literary references to votive monuments erected by or commemorating female prostitutes in Greek sanctuaries in the archaic and classical periods. She concentrates on the degree to which Rhodopis' and Phryne's famous monuments were liminal or transgressive, but she incorporates findings about other votives. Keesling observes that Rhodopis' votive stands midway between those that Snodgrass terms "raw" (everyday objects, e.g., weapons) and "converted" (e.g., statues): Rhodopis dedicated a tithe of ox-spits ("raw") but constructed the offering so that the spits could not be removed (thus becoming "converted"). Keesling also discusses the monument, known only from literary sources, supposedly dedicated to Leaina, who was loyal to the tyrannicides. This tongueless statue, if originally dedicated to her, is the only canting-device animal statue found in a sanctuary (64–65). Phryne's portrait statue in the sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi is also singular as the only portrait before the Roman period that was not part of a family group, as one of three pre-Hellenistic gilded bronze portraits, and...

La primera exposición de esculturas celebrada en el Real Museo de Pinturas

Documents preserved in the archives of the Prado Museum and the Madrid Royal Palace, an announcement in the Diario de Madrid and the testimony of a foreign resident, reveal that the first sculptural works exhibited in the then still denominated Royal Painting Museum for a period of fifteen days in January 1827, were two full-length seated portrait statues executed in Rome: Carlos IV (1817) by Ramon Barba and Maria Luisa de Parma (1816) by Jose Alvarez Cubero. This must have been a major cultural and political event that until now had not been noted in the literature on the history of the museum.

The Votive Statues of the Athenian Acropolis

Part I. Anathemata: 1. Statues as gifts for the gods 2. Votive statue inscriptions 3. Nothing to do with democracy?: Votive statues and Athenian history 4. Votive statues and Athenian society Part II. Divine Identities: 5. The identities of the Acropolis korai 6. The iconography of the Acropolis korai Part III: 7. Fifth century portrait statues on the Acropolis Conclusion Appendices.

Archaeological Research at Aphrodisias in Caria, 1999–2001

Survey, documentation, and excavation projects carried out at Aphrodisias between 1999 and 2001 focused on the study of the city plan, and on the City Wall, the Stadium, the North Agora, the Bouleuterion, the Bishop's Palace, and the Basilica. Research outside the city consisted of limited excavation in three areas just northeast of the City Wall, and a brief survey of known extramural tombs and other structures. Site conservation projects included the beginning of a long-term program for the conservation of the Bouleuterion and a series of emergency repairs to the walls of the Stadium. Sculpture conservation projects continued with trial restorations of two of the Sebasteion reliefs, and the restoration and installation in the Aphrodisias Museum of two portrait statues of boxers found in the Theater in the 1970s. New finds of sculpture include seven sarcophagi from the southeast necropolis and an important Late Antique portrait head. This head belongs to the chlamydatus statue of the governor Oecumenius (ca. A.D. 400) excavated in 1965 in the north stoa of the North Agora together with its inscribed base.

Greek and Roman sculpture and inscriptions from Cyrene: recent joins and proposed associations, including a ‘new” private portrait statue, and some recent epigraphic discoveries

AbstractThis article presents a number of joins and associations recently made in the Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities at the British Museum on sculpture excavated by Robert Murdoch Smith and Edwin Augustus Porcher during their expedition to Cyrene in 1861. The connections were made during an on-going programme within the Greek and Roman Department to provenance and, wherever possible, join the large collection of fragmentary sculpture originating from the big excavations of the 19th century. In addition, some tentative associations between sculpture in the British Museum and others still at Cyrene will be proposed, and some recent epigraphic discoveries made during a visit to the site will also be presented.

The bronze portrait statue NM 23321 from Sparta

In 1964, in the agora at Sparta, Ch. Christou excavated part of a monumental building which is identified as the Persian Stoa. The most important find was a bronze female portrait statue, Roman in date, which is on display in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens (NM 23321). The identification of the statue as Julia Mamaea, suggested by Ch. Christou, is still prevalent, although several scholars see in the Sparta statue iconographical elements that link it with Caracalla's wife Plautilla or with Annia Faustina, Elagabalus' third wife. However, the rendering of the hairstyle provides evidence for the identification of the woman whom the statue depicts as the empress Julia Aquilia Severa, Elagabalus' second and fourth wife. The erection of a statue of Julia Aquilia Severa in the Persian Stoa is most likely connected with the imperial cult of Elagabalus and his empress in Sparta.

Cultural Choice and Political Identity in Honorific Portrait Statues in the Greek East in the Second Century A.D.

The towns of the Middle Roman Empire have left an array of grand columned marble architecture that makes classical sites, from Merida to Ephesus, still so imposing for the modern viewer. The great benefactors who paid for this strange marble culture and for everything else thought worthwhile in an ancient city received large public portrait statues set up on tall elegant moulded bases, set either in columned façades or posted around town at focal points of urban life (see below, Figs 1–2). In their method of signification these statue monuments shared more with poster hoardings than the gallery objects we think of as art. That is, they combined a commanding image with a loud complementary text. They were also different from the public statues of our own times in at least three other important respects — in their prominence, in their sheer quantity, and in that they mostly represented living persons. They were not isolated memorials but potent markers in local politics and aristocratic competition. Architectural setting, inscribed base, statue costume, and styled portrait head all combined to make sometimes complex statements about the subject.

Cultural Choice and Political Identity in Honorific Portrait Statues in the Greek East in the Second Century A.D.

Cultural Choice and Political Identity in Honorific Portrait Statues in the Greek East in the Second Century A.D.

Archaeological Research at Aphrodisias in Caria, 1996

Survey, documentation, and excavation projects carried out at Aphrodisias in 1996 included the continuation of the geophysical survey begun in 1995 of the northern part of the site and further work on the Stadium, North Temenos House, Bouleuterion, North Agora, and Sebasteion. In addition, the regional survey begun in 1993 was continued with a study visit to a newly discovered site in the Maeander River valley; two new inscriptions from the site are discussed in an epigraphical appendix. Sculpture conservation projects included the restoration and installation in the Aphrodisias Museum of a female portrait statue of the mid-second century A. D., and of a Roman Seasons sarcophagus. Study projects were completed on the sculptor's practice pieces from the site, the Late Roman figured pilaster capitals, and a group of portrait statues from the East Bouleuterion area.

The ‘Problem’ With Nude Honorific Statuary and Portraits in Late Republican and Augustan Rome

In his seminal work,The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus, Paul Zanker wrote of a problem with nude honorific statuary in Late Republican Rome and of ‘conflict and contradiction’ in the style of Roman portraits during the same period. The ‘problem’ was a matter of nudity and style; it also had a moral dimension. Under political or social pressure, there was a tendency at Rome to express the effects of cultural change in moral terms: viz., literary works concerned with political or social attitudes of the Romans tended to describe elements likeluxuriaandadulatio(‘luxury’ and ‘sycophancy’) as ‘Greek and decadent in contrast to good, honest, ‘Roman’ values and traditions, such asvirtus(‘courage’),fides(‘good faith’), andpietas(‘devotion’). Taking his cue from such attacks on aspects of the hellenization of Rome, Zanker gave a moral dimension to the ‘conflict and contradiction’ he discerned in the style of Roman honorific statues and portraits of the second and first centuries B.C. This idea that art can express moral values, even moral conflict, is of great interest and fundamental significance. The present paper focuses upon the way Zanker applies it to Late Republican statues and portraits in the light of recent scholarship. In particular, it will be argued, firstly, that the form of the art does not really make sense if there was as much conflict with Greek ideas and styles as generalizations from the literary sources might imply; secondly, that a nude or partially nude portrait statue of a living noble or emperor was not as problematic at Rome as is commonly believed; and thirdly, as a consequence, that Zanker's views about moral conflict in the style of Late Republican statues and portraits, and about the stylistic resolution of this ‘conflict’ under Augustus, should be substantially modified.

A Group of Portrait Statues from the Civic Center of Aphrodisias

This paper offers the first full publication of a group of four marble portrait statues found in 1972 just to the east of the Bouleuterion at Aphrodisias. The statues are all worked to a uniform scale, though they represent figures of differing ages and heights. The group comprises an adult male figure in armor, another wearing civic costume, a youth wearing only a cloak drawn around his hips, and a young boy swathed in a thick mantle. All four figures were found headless, but careful study of the pieces themselves and the original excavation records permits portrait heads to be associated with three of them. The statues are of high quality and show a similarity in manufacture and style of carving distinctive enough to suggest that they all come from the same period, the early first century A. D., and probably from the workshop of Apollonios Aster, son of Chrysippos, who signed one of the figures. The four statues probably belong to a single dedication, made in honor of one of the leading families of the city, set up somewhere close to the Bouleuterion.

Portrait Sculptures in Imperial Ancestral Rites in Song China

On the fourth day of the eleventh month of 1082, the chief councillors and other high officials gathered in the palace about an hour after dawn. They joined guardsmen and musicians, together with Buddhist and Daoist clergy, for a procession of the portrait statues of the imperial ancestors. The procession began at the Pavilion of Heavenly Emblems (Tianzhang ge itNU), where they had recently been assembled from many different locations, and it ended at the Hall of Gathered Heroes (Jiying dian tEE), a major reception hall and site of the palace examina-

Archaeological Research at Aphrodisias in Caria, 1995

New York University's campaign of archaeological research at Aphrodisias in 1995 consisted of field projects designed to investigate the city's urban plan, including excavation, architectural recording, and geophysical survey; an intensive program of sculpture documentation; and a major conservation project to restore and display a nearly complete Roman togate portrait statue of the mid-second century A. D. Other work included a site-conservation program to protect exposed walls using lime mortar, and the continuation of a number of study projects on specific buildings and groups of sculpture.

Images of meditation, uncertainty and repentance in ancient art

Tracing back the history of a single gesture from a painting by Caravaggio to the portrait statue of Demosthenes by Polyeuktos, the problem of its meaning is first posed in terms of iconographical tradition. On the other side, the mutual relation between this gesture and its meaning is not a fixed one: one and the same gesture can cover some different (and even opposite) meanings, and conversely one and the same meaning can be conveyed by some different gestures. Some ways of describing and focusing this changing connection (seen as one of signifier and signified) are suggested.

A Tomb Sculpture of Ezra Cornell

In 1884 William Wetmore Story received a commission to make a recumbent portrait sculpture of Ezra Cornell, the founder of Cornell University, who had died in 1874 (Fig. 1). The piece, which was placed in the memorial mausoleum of Sage Chapel at Cornell University, was executed in Rome and unveiled at Cornell in the fall of 1885.Story was a prominent figure among the nineteenth-century American expatriate sculptors. A lawyer and a poet, as well as a sculptor, he was born in Salem, Massachusetts in 1819 and died in Vallombrosa in 1895. Like Thomas Crawford, Story chose to live in Rome rather than in Florence where Hiram Powers had taken up residence. In his ideal pieces, however, Story differs from these others because of his preference for a more realistic, emotional and literary style. The part of Story's work devoted to portrait busts and statues of nineteenth-century personalities include some of his most interesting pieces, both aesthetically and historically.

Representations of the Antonine Empresses on the Nymphaeum in Olympia

Although sculpted portraits often receive more scholarly attention than the statue bodies they were set into, the different types of statue bodies can reveal more information about the portrait statue as a whole. This paper examines the Nymphaeum in Olympia, a monument which originally included an impressive array of statues of the imperial family as well as the family of its commissioner, Herodes Atticus. By analyzing the statue type of each individual represented, I show that, although the male members of the imperial family may be easily distinguished from those of Herodes’ family according to the type of clothing worn, the female statues cannot be so readily identified. Female garments could be worn in numerous ways, producing subtle variations in the statues too. In order to differentiate the imperial form non-imperial women represented on the Nymphaeum, it is necessary to examine the hairstyle and to compare other examples of the same statues types. I argue that the statues types of imperial women – with regard to their pose, costume, and positioning within the monument – reflect a desire of the imperial family at this time to promote the younger generations and, in doing so, to declare the continuing prosperity of the empire.

The Female Portrait Gallery in Pompey’s Theatre Complex in Rome: Appearance and Impact

Pompey’s large complex in the Campus Martius (55 BC) comprised in addition to the theatre a colonnade portico containing various works of art, among them a gallery of statues representing famous Greek Women. The statues, which were presumably in bronze, have disappeared, but the names of the women are preserved in written sources. Using these sources as well as our knowledge of Greek female portrait statues in general, this article discusses the purpose of the gallery and the possible appearance of the statues.

The Public Memorial and Godefroy's Battle Monument

THE PUBLIC MEMORIAL as we know it is essentially a creation of the Revolutionary age in France.1 Indeed, the first American-made war memorial, Maximilian Godefroy's Battle Monument (Fig. 1) in Baltimore, built 1815-25, might have been erected in Paris more than a decade earlier. The allegorical temper of that age was especially amenable to symbolic architecture having a relationship between subject matter and function usually ignored today. Edme' Bouchardon's equestrian portrait of Louis XV (Fig. 2) was set up in what is now the Place de la Concorde in 1762 about half a century before Godefroy designed the Battle Monument. The distance separating these two, however, was not simply a matter of space and time. Profound changes, philosophical, political and artistic, set these two monuments worlds apart. The portrait statue, consecrated to the dynastic ruler, gave way to the commemorative monument, more abstract in its form as the object of dedication became more general, more democratic and more popular. There is no need to detail the events that elevated the

A New Metope Head from the Parthenon

Some years ago at a London sale of antiquities I acquired three marbles described as ‘Graeco-Roman heads.’ Sale Catalogues are sometimes (not often) unduly modest. One of these heads is in fact an Aphrodite of the Petworth type in close-grained lychnítes, and might be assigned to the closing years of the fourth century, though I should prefer to call it shop-work of a somewhat later period. A second head is a fragment broken from a small portrait statue in crystalline island marble presumably from the quarries of Naxos: it once wore a metal diadem pegged into a single drill-hole on the nape of the neck and perhaps represented some Hellenistic prince. But the third head (Pl. I), which forms the main subject of this paper, is of greater moment, for it is—as all who have seen it agree—an Attic original of the mid fifth century, and as such merits the most careful and circumspect investigation.Of its provenance and history little can be said. It came, like other items sold with it, from a collection formed about 1830 by the grandfather of its late owner. The collector was a wealthy man who had certainly visited Egypt and probably made purchases in Rome. In short, we have the usual story of a well-to-do traveller returning from the Grand Tour with a trunk or two full of Levantine spoils.