Sculptors And Patrons Of Roman Sculpture

SCULPTORS AND PATRONS OF ROMAN SCULPTURE

In most cases, the names of those who sponsored the great works of Roman sculpture are known only from surviving inscriptions. Under the Republic, the Roman oligarchy honoured its most eminent members, and accepted similar honours from its dependents. At that time, statues were erected by the Senate to publicize the deeds of great men and promote their success. They were dedicated exclusively to magistrates, either by the Senate or by provincial towns and communities outside Rome. Although this continued in Imperial times, it was the Emperor who emerged as the principal patron. Within the imperial entourage, the circle of patrons might extend to the chief office holders of the city. In the private domain, portraits or reliefs of a funerary or religious nature were a matter of individual taste and wealth.

Most of the great works of Roman sculpture are anonymous, since the names of their authors have not been preserved. But this does not mean that the artists were unknown to their contemporaries. It is not surprising that the emperor and members of his entourage engaged the most renowned artists, and that such masters could command high prices, far higher than those paid to less skilful colleagues. Phny the Elder, referring in his .Natural History to the sculptor of the cult statue of Venus Geoetrix, which stood in the temple in Caesar’s Forum,

quotes Varro as saying that Arcesilaus was paid far more for his clay model than other sculptors normally received for a finished work. The prestige of a work of art was often measured in terms of its price. For instance, the Felicitas made by Arcesilaus for Lucius Lucullus cost one million sestertii, while Zenodorus was paid forty million for the colossal statue of Mercury that he undertook for the Arvernes of Gaul. The cost of the work was dictated by a market which was to a great extent made up of Greek imports. Thus, Cicero commissioned his friend Atticus to buy statues for a gymnasium on his behalf and, on another occasion, having purchased some Maenads, complained to his dealer, Fabius Callus, that he could not find a suitable place for them in his house.

In Roman society, artists or craftsmen might occupy different rungs on the social ladder, but craftsmen were not generally highly regarded. Lucian, writing in the second century AD, sets out the negative aspects of certain manual activities: “If you become a sculptor, you will be no more than a workman, tiring yourself physically, receiving only a meagre wage, (...) a common labourer, a man lost in the crowd, bowing and scraping to the rich, humble servant of the eloquent, living like a hare and destined to become the prey of the strong. Even if you were a Phidias or a Polyclitus and created a thousand masterpieces, it is your art that would be praised and, of those who admired your work, there would not be one, if he had any common sense, who would wish to take your place. Skilful as you might be you would always be regarded as an artisan, a mere mechanical, a man living by the work of his hands.” A first-century funerary altar so the Vatican Museum shows a sculptor at work. He is dcpicted seated, working on a funerary bust in a clipeus. A stele found ar Bordeaux shows a local sculptor sitting on a bench, wearing a smock and a skullcap, a hammer in his right hand and a chisel in his left. His name is Amandus and he is carving a stele in memory of his brother and fellow—sculptor Amabilis. The scene bears witness to a crafts— manes pride in his workmanship, which he considered worthy to feature on their tomb. Another stele, in the municipal museum of Urbino, shows sculptors engaged in carving sarcophagi. Such groups of craftsmen would set up workshops on the outskirts of towns, close to the burial grounds.

Signatures on works of sculpture are open to interpretation. Do they refer to the patron, the sculptor or the workshop involved? A workshop was a collective enterprise, whether its end products were statues, reliefs or sarcophagi. From roughing out to finishing, the stages of manufacture varied according to the nature and scale of the work, and of course colour was applied to fully completed and polished works and to unfinished decorative pieces. Division of labour was the rule, and the painter was an essential collaborator. The nature of the raw material was undoubtedly the most important variable: the organization of the work and the ultimate sale price would depend on whether a common local stone were used or an imported material requiring special treatment, such as marble. The work of the sculptor varied greatly: from mass production of statues and sarcophagi, where the distinctive features of the human figure were left undefined until the work was actually sold, to precise orders to a workshop or individual sculptor specifying iconographical features and symbolic requirements. Collaboration is evident when different styles can be detected in the same piece of work. Sculptors might also be asked to readapt earlier works to the taste of a new owner, update the iconography or style of a work, transform a public sculpture to meet the requirements of a new ruler, or maintain works offered to the state. In the case of sarcophagi, for instance, it is evident that the portrait was often sculpted a long rime after the reliefs.

There are also portraits and busts whose features and other details have been reworked in order to change their identity. Those of Nero, for instance, in the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore, were reworked into portraits of Vespasian (69—79 AD) after Nero’s fall from grace and damnatio memoriae de facto. There are many examples of this practice. A head of Trajan at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow was carved from an older fragment of a man wearing a toga. Another instance is the colossal statue of Severus Alexander, adapted from a statue of Elagabalus following the latter’s damoatio memoriae. Resemblances between works geographically remote from one another, for instance the portrait of Hermes in Munich and a head kept in the Thessalonica Museum, may be explained by the circulation of models, or by the fact that sculptors tended to bring earlier portraits into line with new official directives.