Rebecca Levitan (University of California, Berkeley)
This paper examines trends of display and collecting in the provinces of the Roman Empire from the 2nd century C.E. onward by mobilizing a particular Hellenistic sculpture’s unique history of copying and transmission. The “Pasquino Group,” was a popular ancient image, depicting an older bearded Homeric warrior carrying the body of a dead younger comrade. Although the bronze original no longer survives, its composition can be inferred through fourteen fragmentary Roman copies in marble, dispersed across the Mediterranean (Andreae and Conticello 1962). Of this corpus, the five full-scale copies recovered in the city of Rome and its environs have exerted an outsized influence. This paper aims to redress the imbalance by highlighting and contextualizing three more “peripheral” copies, examining why the Hellenistic motif of the recovery of the fallen soldier appealed to viewers in each of these ‘provincial’ hubs.
The eponymous copy of the Pasquino Group was excavated at the turn of the 16th century at the location of the Stadium of Domitian. Shortly after, two more fragmentary Roman copies emerged near the sites of the Mausoleum of Augustus and the Porta Portuensis (Bignamini and Hornsby 2010; Haskell and Penny 1982). In the 18th century, Gavin Hamilton recovered a Pasquino Group at Hadrian’s villa at Tivoli (MacDonald and Pinto 1995), and yet another was identified among the larger sculptural program at Tiberius’ Grotto at Sperlonga (Andreae 1994; Himmelmann 1995). These copies have dominated the discussion and interpretation of the original, shaping theories on the identities of the depicted warriors and even granting the type its moniker ‘the Pasquino Group’- the name of a real Renaissance inhabitant of Rome’s Parione district. Yet, with the exception of Sperlonga, the Pasquino Group copies found in and around Rome lack precise archaeological context.
In contrast, two full-scale copies of the Pasquino Group can each be understood within their ancient Roman display contexts thanks to excavations at Aphrodisias in Western Anatolia in 1967 and Loukou in the central Peloponnese from 1989-2001. At the eastern artistic center of Aphrodisias, the sculpture was displayed in the Hadrianic baths, opposite a pendant Achilles and Penthesilea Group (Gensheimer and Welch 2013). Despite the vast distances between these displays, this pairing also occurs across the Aegean at the elaborate Arcadian villa of the sophist Herodes Atticus at Loukou (Spyropoulos 2001). Passing up the Adriatic to the north, seven further fragments of another Pasquino Group were recovered in 1860 from the city walls of Aquileia. These fragments can also be associated with a bath complex, likely within a villa context (Maiuro 2005).
In an effort to balance the traditional bias towards copies of the sculpture directly associated with the city of Rome, this paper will focus on the presence of the famous Hellenistic statue in these three ‘flyover’ regions, using the respective analysis of display contexts in Aquileia, Loukou and Aphrodisias to reexamine larger questions of identity, meaning, and reception within the broader Roman Empire.