Roko Rumora (University of Chicago)
Recently, scholarship on the aesthetics of sculpture in Campanian town houses has been playing catch-up with the volume of work being done on other decorative media. While important studies of diverse sculptural ensembles (Dwyer 1982) or the principles guiding their display (Bartman 1991) have enhanced our understanding of the appeal of statuary for the Campanian homeowner, one aspect of domestic statuary worth further exploration is the role of sculptural multiples, whether identical or mirror reversed, as meaning-making elements within larger ensembles of sculpture. The garden statuary of the House of the Stags in Herculaneum presents a productive case study through which it is possible to demonstrate how Roman ideas about formal similarity and meaningful arrangement in space (dispositio) influenced sculptural display and triggered aesthetic responses grounded in comparative viewing. With the help of long-neglected pictorial graffiti documented in the lavishly-appointed Herculaneum home, this paper will posit comparative viewing of sculpture as both a Roman aesthetic experience in its own right and a cognitive process that could generate new meanings for the individual objects of comparison.
This avenue of research builds both on the growing interest in the role of framing devices in ancient art (Platt and Squire 2017) as well as on the major contributions of Bartman, Dwyer, Gazda and Mattusch on sculptural display in Roman homes and villas. In her important article on pendant pairs of statues, Elizabeth Bartman had recognized the importance of formal comparison for the Roman experience of paired multiples and concluded that such pairs served a highly sophisticated audience able to recognize, among other things, the “somewhat esoteric meaning” of stylistic differences in such pairs. (Bartman 1988, 222) The evidence from the House of the Stags, however, presents a much more inclusive picture about the possible outcomes of comparative viewing. It suggests that formal comparison was not simply a means to an end, but also as a creative end in itself, which allowed audiences to generate new meanings from the inferred relationship between two objects based on their proximity in space. This line of argument has broader methodological stakes for future research on style in Greek and Roman sculpture, beyond our understanding of sculptural aesthetics in the Roman home. Namely, it raises questions about the dependability of literary sources that mention perceived stylistic differences between known sculptors – differences that were themselves implicitly derived from creative comparative viewing of statues.