Daniel Healey (Princeton Unicersity)
According to Roman consensus, pre-Polykleitan sculpture appeared “hard” (dura), “too stiff” (rigidiora), and the embodiment of “rude antiquity” (rudis antiquitas) (Cic. Brut. 70; Quint. Inst. 12.10.7-9; Pliny H.N. 34.58). The material record nevertheless reveals that there was a Roman market for statues exhibiting precisely these qualities, which followed the conventions of Archaic and Early Classical sculpture. Roman archaistic statuary is therefore something of a paradox, which this paper seeks to address. Focusing on sculptural finds from the Villa dei Papiri, it argues that there were two distinctive, albeit simultaneous, Roman approaches to the emulation of antique models – antiquarianism and revivalism – and that these correspond to much broader Roman attitudes towards the past that took shape in the first century BCE. An archaistic bronze bust from the villa, known as the “kouros Pisoni,” is representative of a corpus of archaistic statues that reflect antiquarian interests on the part of Roman artists and audiences (Mattusch 2005, 236-42). Other examples in this category are the overcasts (i.e., exact copies) of early fifth-century bronzes in the Metropolitan Museum and Florence Archaeological Museum, as well as the marble replica series of the so-called “Guicciardini-Munich” kore type (Mattusch 1978; Fuchs 1999; Fullerton 1990). While recent scholarship has described these sculptures as “forgeries,” created to deceive Roman buyers into paying higher prices for genuine “antiques” (Hallett 2015), I argue that they are more likely to reflect a range of intentions on the part of artists and owners when it came to invoking the past. Adapting Riegl’s concept of “age value” (Alterswert) to a Roman context, I propose that the value of these works resided primarily in the unambiguous vetustas of their style. They embodied a remote, ancestral past whose customs and values came to be seen as increasingly important – and endangered – throughout the late Republic and early Empire.
By contrast, the villa’s over-life-sized marble statue of Athena, known as the “Herculaneum Pallas,” stands at the beginning of a Roman revivalist tradition, which updated Archaic sculptural conventions to produce statues that appeared both old and new at the same time. Other examples of this phenomenon are the Augustan archaistic Diana from Pompeii, now in the Naples Archaeological Museum, and a Priapus in the Museo Centrale Montemartini (Zanker 1988, 243-45). I argue that these statues are to be understood in the context of the Augustan religious revival. Just as Augustus is said to have “modified certain relics of rude antiquity to suit the needs of the present” (Tac. Ann. 4.16), these statues revived and revised selected features of Archaic art, including the “archaic smile,” in order to address the urgent religious concerns of a contemporary, mostly private, Roman market.
Antiquarianism and revivalism thus entailed very different approaches to ancient models: precise copying, on the one hand, and eclectic innovation on the other. Yet I argue that they worked towards the fulfilment of a shared goal, which was to erase the distinctions between the past and present via the elision – in visual terms – of ancient art and contemporary art.