Loved this review & analysis!! So many great pieces on display. Wondering if the museum mentioned if statues were originally painted/coloured, or if the focus was on the marble as material/medium solely?
Marble as a medium was definitely the focal point, but where traces of color survive the exhibition pointed it out! I can only recall one specific example where they did this, but it was for a piece I didn’t talk about here. I would have loved to see more about polychromy!
What a great write-up! I'm particularly drawn to the unfinished sculpture you discuss. It almost has an eerie quality to it, especially that side view. It makes me ponder the process of making sculpture out of marble and the qualities of the medium, in a way a finished sculpture might not!
Agreed! I’m thinking of doing some research and writing up a newsletter about making marble sculpture! I’ve haven’t thought too much about that process in courses or my research.
This seems like an incredible exhibition, the unfinished piece is very interesting. Statues of "conquered people" always makes it all the more human and living for me, to see the Romans interact other cultures and translate it into their own iconography! Very nice read, thank you!
It’s so wonderful to be able to experience a part of this exhibition for those who can’t go in person!
I always felt slightly disappointed when realizing that a large part of the sculpture or monument I was looking at was actually a modern reconstruction. I think that reflects a fundamental weakness in the way we approach ancient artifacts: we rely on what’s displayed in museums to provide us with the complete and truthful picture. But the process of displaying an ancient work of art in a museum is inherently UNtruthful. It’s already been removed from its historical and positional context, and the descriptions we append to the works are often far from objective sources of truth. It’s frustratingly impossible to really see the TRUTH of these works, but we keep trying, which in itself is a beautiful testament to the human urge to understand our ancestors.
Thanks for the review! I am very curious about the couple sculpture included in your post. It looks like a sarcophagus lid following Etruscan models (in itself remarkable for a 2nd century piece), but the man's face screams a very modish Hadrian follower while she has a wasp nest hair arrangement that seems to correspond to the late Flavians, maybe early Trajan's reign, so she does not feel like his wife. Maybe she died early? Is she his mother? Do we have any information about the piece? Does the body of the sarcophagus still exist? While old collections are fantastic in terms of artistic quality, it is often frustrating that pieces lose all kind of context.
Super important observations! So you’re on the dot with the dating of the two portrait heads; the museum’s label tells us that they were not original to the sarcophagus but they are ancient. So the sarcophagus survived without its portrait heads and someone added these two heads of different dates to make it compete. The body is actually the other piece with the labors of Hercules I write about!
In terms of the Etruscan model, that’s another great point! The tradition of the reclining figure seems to come from pre-Roman Italy. The Veii Sarcophagus, which you mentions and many others have this motif. The Romans, however, took this tradition and ran with it! It’s a standard lid-form for these monumental asiatic sarcophagi! Broadly this is thought to be a reference to dining posture, and it was standard in funerary ritual to bring food offerings or to dine at the gravesite, so these memorialized poses allowed families to dine together for eternity.
This is such a great example of the effects of restoration, both ancient and modern, for these statues. When the heads of this sarcophagus have been transplanted, the entire story of the artifact changes.
Loved this review & analysis!! So many great pieces on display. Wondering if the museum mentioned if statues were originally painted/coloured, or if the focus was on the marble as material/medium solely?
Marble as a medium was definitely the focal point, but where traces of color survive the exhibition pointed it out! I can only recall one specific example where they did this, but it was for a piece I didn’t talk about here. I would have loved to see more about polychromy!
What a great write-up! I'm particularly drawn to the unfinished sculpture you discuss. It almost has an eerie quality to it, especially that side view. It makes me ponder the process of making sculpture out of marble and the qualities of the medium, in a way a finished sculpture might not!
Agreed! I’m thinking of doing some research and writing up a newsletter about making marble sculpture! I’ve haven’t thought too much about that process in courses or my research.
This seems like an incredible exhibition, the unfinished piece is very interesting. Statues of "conquered people" always makes it all the more human and living for me, to see the Romans interact other cultures and translate it into their own iconography! Very nice read, thank you!
It’s so wonderful to be able to experience a part of this exhibition for those who can’t go in person!
I always felt slightly disappointed when realizing that a large part of the sculpture or monument I was looking at was actually a modern reconstruction. I think that reflects a fundamental weakness in the way we approach ancient artifacts: we rely on what’s displayed in museums to provide us with the complete and truthful picture. But the process of displaying an ancient work of art in a museum is inherently UNtruthful. It’s already been removed from its historical and positional context, and the descriptions we append to the works are often far from objective sources of truth. It’s frustratingly impossible to really see the TRUTH of these works, but we keep trying, which in itself is a beautiful testament to the human urge to understand our ancestors.
Thanks for the review! I am very curious about the couple sculpture included in your post. It looks like a sarcophagus lid following Etruscan models (in itself remarkable for a 2nd century piece), but the man's face screams a very modish Hadrian follower while she has a wasp nest hair arrangement that seems to correspond to the late Flavians, maybe early Trajan's reign, so she does not feel like his wife. Maybe she died early? Is she his mother? Do we have any information about the piece? Does the body of the sarcophagus still exist? While old collections are fantastic in terms of artistic quality, it is often frustrating that pieces lose all kind of context.
Super important observations! So you’re on the dot with the dating of the two portrait heads; the museum’s label tells us that they were not original to the sarcophagus but they are ancient. So the sarcophagus survived without its portrait heads and someone added these two heads of different dates to make it compete. The body is actually the other piece with the labors of Hercules I write about!
In terms of the Etruscan model, that’s another great point! The tradition of the reclining figure seems to come from pre-Roman Italy. The Veii Sarcophagus, which you mentions and many others have this motif. The Romans, however, took this tradition and ran with it! It’s a standard lid-form for these monumental asiatic sarcophagi! Broadly this is thought to be a reference to dining posture, and it was standard in funerary ritual to bring food offerings or to dine at the gravesite, so these memorialized poses allowed families to dine together for eternity.
This is such a great example of the effects of restoration, both ancient and modern, for these statues. When the heads of this sarcophagus have been transplanted, the entire story of the artifact changes.