Beyond Copying Artistic Originality and Tradition - Introduction Book

Introduction: Beyond Copying: Artistic Originality and Tradition
Author(s): Elaine K. Gazda

Source: Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome. Supplementary Volumes, Vol. 1, The
Ancient Art of Emulation: Studies in Artistic Originality and Tradition from the Present
to Classical Antiquity (2002), pp. 1-24
Published by: University of Michigan Press for the American Academy in Rome
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INTRODUCTION
BEYOND COPYING:
ARTISTIC ORIGINALITY AND TRADITION
Elaine K. Gazda
This book presents fresh perspectives on originality and tradition in the art of classical
antiquity, with particular regard to what has long been called copying in Roman art.' It
takes up originality and tradition as constructs not only in relation to the art of the classical
past but also in relation to the art of other periods of Western history-that is to say, within a
framework much larger than the one within which the problems associated with copying,
whether classical or postclassical, are normally considered. Within this broader arena, the
book attempts to take account of discourse on copying and originality as well as on related
issues such as imitation, artistic agency, influence, appropriation, and authenticity. It aspires
to contribute to that discourse and, in the context of classical art history, to move it in some
new directions.
The ideas put forward here by the authors, including myself, emerge from research ini-
tially undertaken and discussed intensively in a seven-week seminar that met in Rome in the
summer of 1994 and in a follow-up weekend workshop in Ann Arbor in 1995.2 Our discus-
sions centered on works of Roman art that have for a long time been marginalized by tradi-
tional scholarship on Classical art, which classifies them as straightforward copies of lost Greek
masterpieces, or "originals," otherwise known only from literary references. In contrast, the
seminar built upon revisionist scholarship of the past three decades, which redefines a num-
ber of the terms of discussion by reclassifying many "Roman copies" as neoclassical or ideal-
izing works and by treating them as legitimate expressions of Roman cultural concerns.3 The
members of the seminar, however, attempted to extend their thinking substantially beyond
what that revisionist scholarship had yielded by 1994.
'The members of the seminar, named in the acknowl- Roman antiquity.

edgments, had everything to do with the thoughts that I
express here. In addition, I wish to thank Ellen Perry, 2 As noted in the acknowledgments, the seminar, entitled
Jennifer Trimble, Ruth Weisberg, James McIntosh, "The Roman Art of Emulation," was held at the Ameri-
Malcolm Bell, Anne Haeckl, Josephine Rogers Mariotti, can Academy in Rome in 1994 under the aegis of the Na-
and Ivan Soll for their suggestions for improving the tional Endowment for the Humanities' Summer Seminars
content and form of this essay at various stages of its for College Teachers. The weekend workshop in Ann Ar-
development. I also thank Melanie Grunow for her help bor was sponsored by the University of Michigan.
with bibliographic citations and proofreading. Any short-
comings are my own. 3 A discussion of revisionist scholarship appears be-
In this essay when the word classical is capitalized, it low in the sections of this essay entitled "'The Roman
refers to the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. in Greece. Copy': A Brief Historiography" and "Postmodern Re-
When it is not capitalized, it refers to both Greek and formulations. "
2 ELAINE K. GAZDA
To help achieve a greater bre

membership included scholars of Greek and Roman art, archaeology, and literature, sev-
eral historians of the art of postclassical periods, and a contemporary artist/critic. Their
varied perspectives on copying converged to a large extent on a critique of the modernist
value system, which from the Romantic era onward has valorized originality and artistic
genius and, in consequence, denigrated copying.4 As one contributor to this volume has
put it, "Modernism . . . had no means of dealing with copies except by finding an 'origi-
nal'-inventing one if necessary-onto which to project the necessary qualities of authen-
ticity and artistic invention."5 The authors of this book attempt to heighten awareness of
the negative effects that such aesthetic values have had upon our interpretations of art of
the past, especially that of the Roman era. In doing so, they take into account shifts that
have occurred in recent decades from modernist to postmodernist thinking, shifts that en-
courage new understandings of the workings of copying in the visual arts in antiquity as
well as in more recent times.
Our seminar took place at a time when the subject of artistic copying had recently be-
come an urgent focus of attention. In the 1980s the postmodernist trend of appropriation
in art demanded that art critics and historians working in postclassical periods of western
European and American art define the copy's status in relation to the original it repro-
duces, appropriates, or in other ways incorporates. No fewer than three conference ses-
sions devoted to facets of this problem were held between 1985 and 1988, accompanied by
a spate of publications.6 But by the time our seminar convened, the ideas generated by
these conferences and publications, about issues of copying in the history of art and their
underlying theoretical bases, had had little impact on the study of "Roman copies." Gener-
ally speaking, research on "Roman copies," which has been ongoing for more than a century,
has largely been conducted independently of that pertaining to the copy in other periods of
Western art history and, indeed, largely in ignorance of it. Though revisionist scholarship on
"Roman copies" had set a new course-toward an understanding of many works, formerly
seen as rote replicas of Classical Greek prototypes, as meaningful classicizing responses to
earlier models-few studies had attempted to situate even that scholarship in a broader
than Graeco-Roman historical context. Fewer still had attempted to come to grips with
4 My use of modernist is akin to Ruth Weisberg's in her tory of Art 20 (Washington, D.C. 1989); another, "Mul-
essay in this volume. Modernism values originality as op- tiples without Originals: The Challenge to Art History
posed to imitation and innovation as opposed to repeti- of the Copy," was held at the annual meeting of the Col-
tion of conventional forms. Such an ideology in art his- lege Art Association of America (CAA) in 1986, and its
tory has its roots in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century papers were published in October 37 (1986); a third,
Romanticism. The high value given by Romanticism and "Recycled Images: Citations and Appropriations of
then modernism to "genius," moreover, can be found in Style," was held at the CAA meeting in 1988. Interest in
earlier figures such as Vasari and Michelangelo and even theorizing the copy as a broad cultural phenomenon
traced in comments from classical authors. I do not mean continued well into the 1990s, as marked by the appear-
"literary modernism" as associated with Pound, Eliot, ance of articles such as I. Soll's "La re-invenci6n de la
and Joyce or any other particular modernisms found in rueda: Reflexiones quijotescas sobre la repetici6n y la
different twentieth-century movements. creatividad," Politeia 25 (Bogota 2000) and others by the
same author cited below (nn. 27, 28), and by books such
'Jennifer Trimble, personal communication. as H. Schwartz's The Culture of the Copy: Striking Like-
nesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles (New York 1996). An-
6The first of the conferences, which took place in 1985 other important book on issues related to copies is J.
at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., was Baudrillard's Simulacres et simulation (Paris 1981). I am
published in 1989 as Retaining the Original: Multiple
grateful to James Porter for recommending these two
Originals, Copies and Reproductions, Studies in the His- books to me.
BEYOND COPYING 3
"the Roman copy" as an artificial construct, the product of modern prejudices and their
intellectual sources.7
One indicator of the power and tenacity of this construct is the common, indeed ubiq-
uitous, didactic label "Roman copy after a Greek original," which can be found in muse-
ums throughout the world on nearly every Roman sculpture and wall painting that portrays
male or female divine beings, mythological heroes, and (in sculpture) athletes in the Classi-
cal style.8 This label, and the construct it encapsulates, presents a highly simplistic view of
the relations between Roman and Greek art-that is, the virtually complete (even mind-
less) dependence of the former upon the latter. In so doing, it reinforces long-established
prejudices against so-called Roman copies and thus perpetuates the negative evaluation of
countless works of Roman art created in the Classical mode. And it colors our perception
of the nature and quality of other forms of Roman art as well.9 The construct of "the Ro-
man copy" directs us as viewers to look through and beyond the work of the Roman pe-
riod, as if it were transparent, in search of its putative lost model. It implies that we should
assign value to such a work according to the degree of its (presumed) faithfulness to its
(presumed Greek) model. It requires that we judge the Roman work in terms of its relative
utility for reconstructing what has been lost from another place, time, and culture-a cul-
ture that is, moreover, commonly held to be superior in aesthetic matters to that of the
Romans. It prevents us from seeing the Roman work for what it is-a work of its own time,
place, and culture, however much it may respond to works and styles of the (even by then)
centuries-old Classical tradition. The construct of the "Roman copy after a Greek origi-
nal," in effect, excludes an enormous corpus of Roman sculpture and painting from the
history of Roman visual culture. Moreover, by directing us to include that corpus within
the purview of Classical Greece, and thus to accept later Roman works as surrogates for
I S. A. Jaros, "Roman Copies of Greek Sculptures and this book was translated and edited by Mrs. S. A. Strong
the Problem of the 'Nobilia Opera"' (Ph.D. diss., Co- (E. Sellers Strong) and published as E Wickhoff, Roman
lumbia University 1993) provides a detailed historio- Art: Some of Its Principles and Their Application to Early
graphic analysis with particular attention to German Christian Painting (London 1900). Like Wickhoff, Strong
scholarship of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. was a proponent of treating Roman art as worthy of study
See also E. K. Gazda, "Roman Sculpture and the Ethos in its own right rather than merely as the final chapter in
of Emulation: Reconsidering Repetition," Harvard Stud- the history of Greek art. While Wickhoff apparently con-
ies in Classical Philology 97 (1995), esp. 124-29, with curred that "Roman copies of Greek originals" were le-
much of the earlier bibliography. Despite significant ad-gitimately treated as such, he focused attention on his-
vances of the past six years, noted below in the section torical reliefs, portraits, paintings, and other categories
entitled "Since 1994," these general conditions of schol- of Roman artwork that he regarded as most telling of
arship continue to prevail. Roman artistic achievements. This view, however, did not
meet with unanimous agreement in its day. For example,
8 Problems related to museum labels that designate Ro-contra Wickhoff, A. Hekler mounted a powerful defense
man sculptures as "Roman copies after Greek originals" of the established approach to Roman art in his Romische
were highlighted in a session entitled "Truth in Adver- geweibliche Gewandstatuen, Miinchner archdologische
tising: Labeling Greco-Roman Sculpture," organized by Studien (Munich 1909), esp. 109-10. For commentary
Miranda Marvin for the annual meeting of the College on Hekler's views, see J. F. Trimble, "The Aesthetics of
Art Association in 1996. Sameness: A Contextual Analysis of the Large and Small
Herculaneum Woman Statue Types in the Roman Em-
9 The notion that Roman art is wholly, indeed slavishly,pire" (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan 1999) 172-
dependent upon Greek art permeated scholarship in the 73. See also 0. Brendel, "Prolegomena to a Book on
nineteenth century and well into the twentieth. An early Roman Art," Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome
attempt to claim a degree of originality for artists of the21 (1953), and the reissue of this classic essay as 0.
Roman period who produced works other than "cop- Brendel, Prolegomena to the Study of Roman Art, ed. J.
ies" (such as illusionistic reliefs) was put forward by E J. Pollitt (New Haven 1979), for a seminal discussion of
Wickhoff in Die Wiener Genesis (Vienna 1895). Part of the historiography of Roman art.
4 ELAINE K. GAZDA
earlier, now-lost Greek ones,

fourth centuries B.C.10
Recent scholarship is heaping up demonstrations that so-called Roman copies cannot be
understood in this way. And yet the weight of tradition pulls strongly against the newer ways
of thinking. In the minds of most viewers, including many scholars of classical art, "Roman
copies," continue to reside in a limbo, somewhere between the Greek and Roman spheres
and arbitrarily segregated from the other major types of Roman visual imagery-such as por-
traiture, historical reliefs, and sarcophagi." In order to situate this book in relation to these
opposing schools of thought, let us briefly review the history of "the Roman copy" construct
and the issues it raises. Where did this construct come from? In what ways has it shaped
what has been said? How can the scholarship go forward productively from here?
"The Roman Copy": A Brief Historiography
The roots of the concepts that envelop "Roman copies" are gnarled and deep. Some have
even been claimed to extend to antiquity itself. But it is the modern formulation of the con-
struct that particularly concerns us here. This formulation has two distinct but intertwined
threads: the valorization of Greek art, and the insistence upon authenticity and artistic in-
vention. The presumption of Greek artistic supremacy is perhaps its most profoundly seated
component. In his extraordinarily influential writings of the eighteenth century, J. J.
Winckelmann argued powerfully to establish Classical Greek style as the new formal stan-
dard for art produced in Europe of his day.12 Since, in Winckelmann's view, all art after the
10 There are still formidable defenders of this view such

of as those of Wickhoff and Strong (as n. 9) and oth-
"Roman copies." See J. J. Pollitt's valuable historiogra- ers like Alois Riegl. See Brendel (as n. 9) on the pursuit
of originality (Romanitas) in Roman art. Romanitas has
phy of the tradition of Meisterforschungen in Greek art,
in "Introduction: Masters and Masterworks in the Study been, and to a large extent continues to be, understood
of Classical Sculpture," in Personal Styles in Greek Sculp- as located in works whose Roman subject matter and
tare, ed. 0. Palagia and J. J. Pollitt, Yale Classical Stud- function are undeniable, such as portraiture and histori-
ies 30 (Cambridge, U.K. and New York 1996) 1-15. cal reliefs. The term Romanitas, meaning "Romanism,
While Pollitt regards revisionist scholarship on "Roman the Roman way or manner" (Tert. Pall. 4, as noted in
copies" as a salutary development, he believes that re- Lewis and Short, A Latin Dictionary, 1993 ed. [1879])
search on the recovery of lost works of Greek masters has been adopted by modern scholars as a code word to
can proceed by relying, albeit cautiously, on the evidence signify Roman originality or uniqueness in art, but it as-
of "Roman copies." In contrast, see my own arguments sumes the modern meaning of originality rather than
in Gazda (as n. 7). See also B. S. Ridgway, Roman Cop- defining it in Roman terms.
ies: The Problem of the Originals, Jerome Lectures 15 (Ann
Arbor 1984) on how attributions based on very little 12 For example, Winckelmann's Reflections on the Imita-
evidence compound themselves in scholarship on Greek tion of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture (1755),
art that depends on "Roman copies." Subsequent publi- trans. E. Heyer and R. C. Newton (La Salle 1987), and
cations by Ridgway reinforce this point. See, for example, Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums (Dresden 1764),
her most recent book, Hellenistic Sculpture II. The Styles which build upon the views of such writers as A. Felibien
of ca. 200-100 B.C. (Madison 2000) chap. 8. in the late seventeenth century, who had already ad-
vanced the notion that Greek art was superior in work-
11 For further discussion of the categories into which the manship to Roman. See Gazda (as n. 7) 125, n. 10 for
corpus of Roman sculpture has traditionally been di- further bibliography. See also A. A. Donohue, "Winckel-
vided, and the values that have been attached to those mann's History of Art and Polyclitus," in Polykleitos, the
categories, see Gazda (as n. 7). Confined to a category Doryphoros, and Tradition, ed. W. G. Moon (Madison
of their own, "copies" have not participated in earlier 1995) 327-53; Pollitt (as n. 10) 6-7; J. Morrison,
(Romanticist/modernist-inspired) considerations of what Winckelmann and the Notion of Aesthetic Education (Ox
is "original," what is "truly Roman," about Roman art, ford 1996). Others who had similar inclinations included
BEYOND COPYING 5
period of Alexander the Great was merely a degraded form of Classical Greek art, it fol-
lowed that the art of the Roman era must be aesthetically inferior. In effect, this theory im-
plies that Roman art existed only as a debased form of Greek art. Ironically, Winckelmann
mistook many Roman works for Greek, including the famous Apollo Belvedere (fig. 5.1),
which he revered as the finest exemplar of Greek Classical style.13
Nevertheless, by the early nineteenth century, the overriding influence of Winckelmann
and his followers had succeeded in securing the place of Classical Greek art at the pinnacle
of contemporary aesthetic values. In this era-which also celebrated individual artistic ge-
nius-scholars, artists, and the general public yearned to see an original bronze statue by
Myron or Polykleitos, or a painting by the hand of Apelles or Zeuxis. The challenge this
posed to scholars was to piece together what they could of the lost oeuvres of these and other
renowned Greek "masters." Aided by plaster casts of "Roman copies" and, after 1850, the
new medium of photography, and inspired by the nineteenth-century desire for an increas-
ingly scientific approach to archaeological research, scholars adopted the methodology known
as Kopienkritik from philologists who had invented it to reconstruct the stemmata of lost Ur-
texts from multiple later manuscript copies. Despite a number of contemporary objections
to applying the methods of Kopienkritik to the study of sculpture (for it was on sculpture
that this pursuit focused), the tantalizing prospect of recovering "Greek originals" from "Ro-
man copies," however risky, proved irresistible.14 With the writings of Adolf Furtwangler in
the last decade of the nineteenth century, this critical system took a firm hold in sculpture
studies."5 As the practice of Kopienkritik became a major academic pursuit, hundreds of classi-
cizing, or neoclassical, compositions of the Roman period, which had not previously been clearly
distinguished from earlier Greek works, were demoted to the status of mechanically produced
replicas. Their value was to be assessed chiefly according to the degree of exactitude with which
they were thought to preserve the appearance of otherwise lost Greek masterpieces.
It is perhaps obvious that in this endeavor, an "exact" or "true" mechanically produced
copy, which leaves no room for artistic invention on the part of the copyist, would come to
be a crucial component of Kopienkritik methodology and thus would be preferred over all
others as the most accurate reflection of the imagined prototype. Any deviations from what
scholars presumed to be the original composition of the lost work had to be attributed to the
copyist's misunderstanding or error. Such "variant" works (also called "free copies"), which
are therefore not "true copies," pose a thorny problem for practitioners of Kopienkritik, for
they undermine confidence in the quality of the evidence on which their reconstructions are
William Hamilton and Anton Raphael Mengs. See A. D.1997) 7-28. On casts see Haskell and Penny (as n. 13) chaps.
Potts, "Greek Sculpture and Roman Copies I. Anton 3, 5, 11. Pollitt (as n. 10) traces the development of con-
Raphael Mengs and the Eighteenth Century," Journal of
noisseurship studies on the Greek masters from the eigh-
the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 43 (1980) 150-73, teenth century onward. He credits the contributions of the
and id., Flesh and The Ideal: Winckelmann and the Ori- Jonathan Richardsons (father and son) and others whose
gins of Art History (New Haven 1994). work predates that of J. J. Winckelmann.
13See F. Haskell and N. Penny, Taste and the Antique: 15 A. Furtwangler, Meisterwerke der griechischen Plastik.
The Lure of Classical Sculpture 1550-1900 (New Haven Kunstgeschichtliche Untersuchungen (Leipzig 1893); id.,
and London 1981) 148-51, no. 8. "Ueber Statuenkopien im Alterthum," Abhandlungen
Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. Philosophisch-
'4See Gazda (as n. 7) 124-36 with earlier bibliography;historische
M. Klasse 20.3 (Munich 1896). For a contempo-
Marvin, "Roman Sculptural Reproductions or Polykleitos: rary critique of Furtwangler's approach, see R. Kekule's
The Sequel," in Sculpture and Its Reproductions, ed. A. review of Meisterwerke in Goettingische Gelehrte
Hughes and E. Ranfft, Reaktion. Critical Views (London Anzeigen, no. 8 (1895) 625-43.
6 ELAINE K. GAZDA
based."6 Yet, in spite of the fact that this problem had been recognized virtually from the
start, the enterprise went forward. Soon the binary construct of "Roman copy/Greek origi-
nal" was fixed firmly in place, heavily laden with value judgments that valorized Greek artis-
tic originality (while claiming a Roman lack thereof) and the agency of the individual Greek
artistic personality, or genius, (in contrast to a presumed lack of agency on the part of the
anonymous Roman copyist), and so on. Little thought was given to whether these values were
important to the ancient Romans or, for that matter, to the Classical Greeks.
Kopienkritik clearly rests upon a series of highly questionable assumptions about cul-
tural hierarchies and the primacy of originality in art. Indeed, it assumes that originality in
Romanticist/modernist terms was a valid criterion for assessing the relative value of the
achievements of the Classical Greeks and the later Romans. Not surprisingly, the method-
ology has been subjected to ongoing challenges and refinements, which have increased in
number and intensity in the past three decades.'7 Most of these are revisionist in spirit and
center on the same "free copies" or "variants" that impede the reconstruction of lost "origi-
nals," for such artworks have proven to be fertile ground for those who see in them evi-
dence not of mindless, direct copying but of Roman artists' creative engagement, and even
rivalry, with the standards of Classical form and subject matter established by fifth- and
fourth-century Greek predecessors. In one of the earliest refinements of Kopienkritik, pub-
lished in 1923, Georg Lippold paved the way for studying "free copies" as works of art in
16 In the late nineteenth century Heinrich Brunn, who

sculptors made exact copies by means of a mechanical
was Furtwangler's teacher, masterminded the great com- device similar to the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-cen-
pendium of photographs, Denkmdler der griechischer und tury pointing machine, which required the intermediary
romischer Skulptur (Munich), volumes of which began of a plaster cast of the model; (4) that, given the exacti-
to appear in 1887. Along with developments in photog- tude that the pointing process permits, it is possible to
raphy and publications containing photographic illus- reconstruct lost works of art based on the evidence of
trations of classical sculptures, the Denkmdler greatly "Roman copies"; and (5) that the existence of multiples
facilitated the study of multiple "replicas" of classical of a particular composition may be taken as evidence
compositions. See Pollitt (as n.10). Even so, Brunn that they derive from a single Greek model, most likely
warned of the sometimes dramatic differences among a famous Classical "masterpiece." In response to these
several "replicas" that, according to the precepts of premises the following objections have been raised: (1)
Kopienkritik, ought to derive from the same prototype. that replication occurred as a conscious strategy in many
The index to the Denkmdler carefully distinguishes works forms of Roman visual communication and is not neces-
that are considered to be replicas of Greek originals from sarily an indication of copying from a Classical Greek
others of more questionable status. See E. E. Perry, "Ar- original; (2) that the usually cited literary sources on
tistic Imitation and the Roman Patron with a Study of patronage and taste are considerably earlier than the
Imitation in the Ideal Sculptures of Herodes Atticus" vast number of "copies" known today; (3) that there is
(Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan 1995) introduction; no concrete evidence that pointing devices were used
also Gazda (as n. 7). It should go without saying that (many reproductions of canonical types have now been
distinguishing true from free copies is an impossible ex- shown to have been carved more freely and with greater
ercise in the absence of the original model. artistic individuality than was earlier supposed; more-
over, the roles of the plaster cast and of the prototypes
17 The historiography, objectives, and weaknesses of
themselves in the reproduction process have also been
Kopienkritik have been analyzed in a number of early called into question); (4) that in the absence of the origi-
and recent studies of "Roman copies," including my own nal the goal of identifying a copy is unattainable, and
article (Gazda [as n. 7] with earlier bibliography), from besides, Romans, even those of the late Republic (e.g.,
which the following summary of points derives. The key Cicero), did not seem to have specific prototypes in
underlying premises, in brief, are: (1) that when war mind, nor did they prefer exact copies of particular
booty stimulated Roman taste for Greek art and the sup- images; rather they wanted appropriate ornamenta that
ply of "originals" was exhausted, copies were made to conformed to the ratio decoris; and, finally, (5) that in
fulfill Roman demand; (2) that exact copies were desired many cases the prototype of a series of similar images
by Roman patrons and even preferred over freer versions can be shown to have been Roman rather than Classi-
of well-known Classical prototypes; (3) that Roman-era cal Greek in origin.
BEYOND COPYING 7
their own right.'8 By introdu

and Umwandlung, Lippold suggested that these Roman images could be viewed as works of
classicizing art similar in their revivalism to those of other periods, such as the Renaissance
or nineteenth century. Lippold, however, maintained the view that Greek sculptures were
aesthetically superior to even these new Roman transformations of them. Although a few others
followed in Lippold's path from the 1930s to the 1950s, it remained for scholars of the late
1960s and 1970s to begin to assess Roman revivalistic trends in more neutral aesthetic terms.'9
Brunilde Ridgway's 1970 study of the Severe Style in Greek sculpture, for example, distin-
guished "severizing" Roman works from copies and pastiches and treated them as legitimate
expressions of Roman taste.20 The early 1970s saw in rapid succession several key publica-
tions by German scholars-notably F. Priesshofen and P. Zanker (1970-71), R. Wiinsche
(1972), W. Trillmich (1973), and P. Zanker (1974), among others.21 In the 1970s German scho
ars introduced the term Idealplastik to designate sculptures that are not thought to be exa
copies of a Greek model but, rather, following on Lippold's reasoning, are neoclassical (o
classicistic) works inspired by a number of earlier Greek compositions. These studies comp
mented and extended earlier work on the Romans' taste for Greek works of art.22
Scholarship on Roman literature also had an important impact on the new direction of
inquiry and led to further refinements. Building upon the 1959 study of Roman literary imitatio
by A. Reiff, who analyzes the nuances of three forms-interpretatio, imitatio, and aemula-
ti-oand to some extent upon Lippold's subcategories, Wiinsche (1972) proposed an analog
of various forms of imitationes in Roman sculpture. According to this scheme, the "exact" or
"true copy" was the counterpart of literary interpretatio (direct translation of one source);
the "free copy," of imitatio (interpretation based on more than one source); and "ideal sculp-
ture, of aemulatio (creative rivalry; new works resulting from long exposure to numerous
source monuments that had been thoroughly assimilated, not rote-copied, by the artist).23
Some notion of the Roman rationale behind different forms of response to Greek models
thus began to take shape.
In 1987 T. Holscher (1987) pursued this rationale along another trajectory. Following a
18 G. Lippold, Kopien und Umbildungen griechischer

which she considers archaizing Roman sculptures. See also
Statuen (Munich 1923). Lippold's conservatism is espe- her earlier article, "The Bronze Apollo from Piombino in
cially evident in his Antike Gemdldekopien. Abhand- the Louvre," Antike Plastik 7 (1967) 43-75.
lungen, Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften.
Philosophisch-historische Klasse 33 (Munich 1951), in 21 F. Priesshofen and P. Zanker, "Reflex einer eklektischen
which, following the example of Furtwangler, he applies Kunstanschauung beim Auktor ad Herennium," Dialoghi
the principles of Kopienkritik to wall paintings in an ef-di Archeologia 4-5 (1970-71) 100-119; R. Wiinsche,
fort to reconstruct lost Greek masterpieces. "Der Jiingling von Magdalensberg: Studien zur rom-
ischen Idealplastik," in Festschrift Luitpold Dussler: 28
'9A. Rumpf, "Der Idolino," Critica d'Arte 4 (1939) 17- Studien zur Archdologie und Kunstgeschichte (Munich
27; C. C. Vermeule, "Graeco-Roman Statues: Purpose 1972) 45-80; W. Trillmich, "Bemerkungen zur Erfor-
and Setting-I," Burlington Magazine 108 (October schung der romischen Idealplastik," Jahrbuch des
1966) 545-58 and "Graeco-Roman Statues: Purpose and deutschen archdologischen Instituts 88 (1973) 247-82; P.
Setting-II," Burlington Magazine 108 (November 1966) Zanker, Klassisistiche Statuen. Studien zur Verdnderung
607-13; also id., Greek Sculpture and Roman Taste: The des Kunstgeschmacks in der romischen Kaizerzeit (Mainz
Purpose and Setting of Graeco-Roman Art in Italy and am Rhein 1974).
the Imperial Greek East, Jerome Lectures 12 (Ann Arbor
1977). 22 See, for example, Vermeule (as n. 19).
20 B. S. Ridgway, The Severe Style in Greek Sculpture 23 A. Reiff, "Interpretatio, imitatio, aemulatio: Begriff und
(Princeton 1970) chap. 9. This was followed by Ridgway's Vorstellung literarischer Abhangigkeit bei den R6mern'
Archaic Styles in Greek Sculpture (Princeton 1975), in (diss., Cologne 1959); Wiinsche (as n. 21).
8 ELAINE K. GAZDA
path forged by Brendel, which acknowledges the stylistic pluralism of Roman art, H6lscher
proposed a semantic system that foregrounds the Romans' awareness of the different expres-
sive capacities of various styles associated with famous Greek masters of the fifth and fourth
centuries B.C. and the consequent deliberate Roman use of certain styles to portray particular
subjects. Thus, Pheidian maiestas and pondus were regarded as appropriate for representing
gods, Polykleitan decor supra verum for heroes, Lysippan veritas for men, and so on.24 A re-
lated contextualizing trend emphasized the Roman architectural and sociopolitical settings
of ideal sculptures. A steady stream of studies of the programmatic content and display of
"Roman copies" and ideal sculptures in specific architectural settings-such as imperial halls,
baths, theaters, fountain houses, villas, and town houses-appeared throughout the late 1970s,
1980s, and 1990s.25 By the early 1990s much progress had been made, but the study of "the
Roman copy" remained largely a pursuit unto itself, isolated within the realm of classical art
history and archaeology.
Postmodern Reformulatzons
In the mid 1980s copy studies in classical art were drawn briefly into the orbit of art histori-
ans working on problems associated with the copy in other periods. The conference, "Re-
taining the Original: Multiple Originals, Copies, and Reproductions," held in 1985 at the
National Gallery of Art's Center for the Advanced Study of the Visual Arts (CASVA), in-
cluded two papers on Greek and Roman "copies" along with others on related developments
in medieval through neoclassical art.26 The proceedings, moderated by Rosalind Krauss, de-
bated a variety of approaches to reevaluating established notions about copies and originals.
These have not been taken up by scholars of classical art, although, as I argue below, several
of the issues, which Krauss articulates in her introduction to the conference publication of
24 T. H6lscher, Romische Bildsprache als semantisches Sys-"Freestanding Sculptures from the Baths of Caracalla,"
tem. Abhandlungen der Heidelberg Akademie der American Journal of Archaeology 87 (1983) 347-84; R.
Wissenschaften, Philosophi'sche-hi'stori'sche KIasse 1987.2
Bol, Das Statuenprogramm des Herodes-Atticus-Nymph-
(Heidelberg 1987). At about the same time, Eugene aums, Olympische Forschungen 15 (Berlin 1984); D.
Dwyer applied a similar theory to Pompeian sculpture Pandermalis, "Zum Programm der Statuenausstattung
in "Decorum and the History of Style in Pompeian Sculp- in der Villa dei Papiri," Mitteilungen des deutschen
ture," Studia Pompeiana & Classica in Honor of archdologischen Instituts, Athenische 86 (1971) 173-209;
Wilhelmina F. Jashemski, vol. 1, ed. R. I. Curtis (New J. Raeder, Die statuarische Ausstattung der Villa
Rochelle 1988) 105-11. See also P. Zanker, "Zur Hadriana bei Tivoli (Frankfurt 1983); R. Neudecker, Die
Funktion und Bedeutung griechischer Skulpturen
Skulpturenausstattung
in der romischer Villen in Italien (Mainz
R6merzeit," in Le classicisme d Rome aux Iers siecles
am Rhein
avant
1988); E. Bartman, "Decor et Duplicatio: Pen-
dants in283-
et apres J.-C., Entretiens Hardt 25 (Geneva 1979) Roman Sculptural Display," American Journal
306. Brendel (as n. 9). of Archaeology 92 (1988) 211-25; P. G. Warden and D.
G. Romano, "The Course of Glory: Greek Art in a Ro-
25Among numerous others, see the following examples: man Context at the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum,"
G. Bejor, "La decorazione sculturea dei teatri romani Art History 17 (1994) 228-54. Among other notable
nelle provincie africane," Prospettiva 17 (1979) 37-46; studies of the 1980s and early 1990s are E. Bartman,
P. Zanker, "Das Villa als Vorbild des spiten pompejan-
Ancient Copies in Miniature (Leiden 1992) and articles
ischen Wohngeschmacks," Jahrbuch des deutschen by both Ridgway and Marvin (as n. 26).
archdologischen Instituts 94 (1979) 460-523; H.
Manderscheid, Die Skulpturenausstattung der kaiserzeit- 26B. S. Ridgway, "Defining the Issue: The Greek Period,"
lichen Thermenanlagen (Berlin 1981); F. K. Yegiul, "A and M. Marvin, "Copying in Roman Sculpture: The Rep-
Study in Architectural Iconography: Kaisersaal and the lica Series," in Retaining the Original (as n. 6) 13-26,
Imperial Cult," Art Bulletin 64 (1982) 7-3 1; M. Marvin, 29-45, respectively.
BEYOND COPYING 9
1989, bear directly on problems associated with copying in the Roman era. A brief review of
those issues can thus serve here to illustrate some potentially helpful directions that the study
of "Roman copies" might take. At the same time it can underscore one of the central goals of
the seminar and of this book-that is, to draw the study of "the Roman copy" out of its
relative isolation from discourse on "the copy" in art of other periods and cultures.
As Krauss acknowledges, in the 1980s, "the discipline [of art history was] . . . being buf-
feted by the winds of a postmodernist interest in 'appropriation'," and art historians and
critics were called upon to respond to a number of the tenets of recent schools of thought,
such as poststructuralism and postmodernism.27 Among these is the reversal of claims that
marginalize the copyist, the copy, and copying in favor of the centrality of the artist, the origi-
nal, and originality. Krauss, along with other poststructuralist theorists, rejects the notion of
the artist as an independent agent who creates works of art.28 Further, they replace the work
of art with the notion of a "text," which both precedes and exceeds the individual author or
artist.29 In positing the "death of the author," such a theory eliminates, or at the very least
drastically alters, our traditional concept of the author/artist as the creator of "originals."
Moreover, as Krauss points out, poststructuralism shares with postmodernism a suspicion of
all hierarchies. The long-established hierarchy, which places a lower value on the copy than
on the original it reproduces, is therefore also open to reexamination. Such provocative re-
formulations seem to me to hold potential for throwing a fresh light on some of the questions
we deal with in relation to "the Roman copy" and "the Greek original." For example, the
anonymous Roman artist or artisan has long been regarded as a nonentity, and his apparently
repetitive products as undifferentiated by the stamp of a discernible artistic personality. The
concept of an authorless work suggests one way to dignify the production of repetitious im-
agery of the Roman era. Further, the undermining of hierarchies suggests that "copies" and
"originals" should be dealt with on an equal footing.
Another notion articulated by Krauss also has potential application to the study of "the
Roman copy." Krauss formulates a conceptual framework within which to classify and view
copies. In opposition to repetition that occurs within what she calls "the classical system of
adequatio," where there is always an original against which to test the adequacy of the copy,
she sets a system of seriality, which presents "a freakish problem of a proliferation of identi-
cal copies with no original to underwrite their accuracy," such as occurs when artists repro-
duce their own works.30 As an example she notes that Ingres made no fewer than four paintings
27 R. E. Krauss, "Retaining the Original? The State of Image, Music, Text, trans. S. Heath (New York 1977).
the Question," in Retaining the Original (as n. 6) 7. The For a critique of the fallacies of Benjamin's essay, see I.
boundaries between poststructuralist and post- Soll, "Mechanical Reproducibility and the Recon-
modernist ideas are not well established and, in any ceptualisation of Art: Thoughts in the Wake of Walter
case, are not relevant for my purposes. See the discus- Benjamin," in New Comparison 18 (1994) 24-41. Implicit
sion by I. Soll, "Necropsia de lo postmoderno" in Soll's critique is that the idea of the death of the au-
("Postmodern Postmortems"), trans. E. Rodriguez, thor has been with us for a long time. I am grateful to
Politeia 22 (Bogota 1998). Ivan Soll for discussing his views with me.
28 Krauss (as n. 27) 9, in her thinking, builds on W.Barthes, "De l'oeuvre au text," Revue Aesthetique 3
29R.
Benjamin's well-known essay, "The Work of Art in the (1971), an English translation of which appears as "From
Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Illuminations (1985) Work to Text," in Image, Music, Text (as n. 28).
219-53, which originally appeared in French in the
Zeitschrift fir Sozialforschung 5 (193 6) 40-68, and also 30 Krauss (as n. 27) 9. Here Krauss's thinking reflects that
on poststructuralist thinkers such as Roland Barthes. See, of Benjamin on editions without an authoritative origi-
for example, R. Barthes, "The Death of the Author," in nal. For an opposing view, see Soll (as n. 28).
10 ELAINE K. GAZDA
of Raphael and La Fornarina, el

replications of his major painting
a series among themselves that h
Krauss herself finds a Roman parallel for her two systems-adequatio and seriality-in the
paradigm shift on which Miranda Marvin focuses in her paper for the CASVA conference of
1985, "Copying in Roman Sculpture: The Replica Series." This shift entails moving away from
the traditional theory of "the Roman copy" as a reflection of a "lost Greek original" to the more
recent revisionist one that draws attention to the Romans' programmatic use of repeated, recog-
nizable, often famous (but not necessarily Greek) images -which Marvin calls "the visual equiva-
lent of cliches. "32 According to Marvin, these images announced the use of a particular type of
building and were valued for their subject matter rather than their formal or iconographic ori-
gins, creators, or style. These opposing theories of "the Roman copy" suggest two equations to
Krauss. In one she pairs the system of adequatio with the traditional Roman copy theory, which
values, as Krauss puts it, "copies that would prolong and extend the experience of the original:
the original master, the original style, the original access onto beauty." In the other, she links the
system of seriality with the programmatic use of repeated images.33 In pressing my own argument
for the potential relevance of certain postmodern concepts for reevaluating the various compo-
nents of "the Roman copy" construct, I believe that Krauss's "auto-repetitions," which in her
view "lack the need for an original," further suggest a way to rethink the construct of "the Greek
original" that we have long imagined as an entity necessary to the methodology of Kopienkritik.34
Some members of the seminar were skeptical of the dicta of poststructuralist and
postmodernist art historical revisionist critiques, especially as applied to classical art, but the
radically altered perspectives these critiques engender did, nevertheless, provoke us to ask
questions about the ways that the posited revisions and reversals might apply to the problem
of "the Roman copy." Should we continue to privilege originals over copies and known art-
ists over anonymous ones? Should we go so far as to abandon our belief that artistic original-
ity resides in the creative individual? Does the existence of multiple originals, as in the work
of Ingres or more commonly in the graphic arts, seriously threaten the construction of the
"famous Greek master" versus "the anonymous Roman sculptor or painter"? Does it threaten
31 Krauss (as n. 27) 9. See also R. E. Krauss, "You Irre- Freudian, Marxist, Derridian, or Foucauldian-was,
placeable You," in Retaining the Original (as n. 6) 151- then, the cause of the change of the title for this sym-
59 for further discussion of Ingres's auto-repetitions. posium, and Multiples without Originals became Origi-
In following up on a College Art Association sympo- nality as Repetition."
sium in 1986, entitled "Multiples without Originals: The
Challenge to Art History of the 'Copy'," Krauss went 32Krauss (as n. 27) 10 cites Marvin (as n. 26).
even further in positing originality as repetition in place
of the unitary original, "an always already self-divided 3 Krauss (as n. 27) 9-10. Krauss's application of this
origin." See R. Krauss, "Originality as Repetition: In- theory of adequatio to "Roman copies," however, does
troduction," October 37 (1986) 40. In summarizing her not acknowledge that the originals that "underwrite their
further thoughts on the conference, Krauss says: "To accuracy" in all but a handful of cases are now lost.
capture this movement of an always already self-divided
origin was, I realized, to carry out the examination of " See Soll (as n. 28) on the difference between the need
the very tools and categories of art history at a level for an authoritative original and the lack of one, as in
that seemed to me extremely telling. And it therefore the example of printmaking. Carol Mattusch takes a tech-
became clear that what was important to this subject nical approach to "deconstructing" the notion of "the
was the examination-in-practice of a group of theoreti- Greek bronze original" in her book Classical Bronzes:
cal models in which the origin is problematized through The Art and Craft of Greek and Roman Statuary (Ithaca
the very agency of repetition. The centrality for this dis-and London 1996), esp. chap. 5 and also in chap. 5 of
cussion of models of repetition-whether these be the present volume.
BEYOND COPYING 11
the status of reconstructed "Greek originals" versus their presumed copies? Might we, per-
haps, ask of many "replica series" in Roman art to what extent the individual members of the
series (though not auto-repetitions as far as we can tell) may be seen as independent of "an
original"? To what extent are the "replica series" we detect today within the vast corpus of
"Roman copies" merely artificial constructs-products of our imaginings that bear little or
no relation to the ways in which the individual Roman works we place within a given series
were perceived by their ancient makers and viewers?35 Such are some of the questions stimu-
lated by recent theories of the copy in the history of art. And although the questions may
remain difficult to answer, they provided our seminar an opportunity to experiment with
new approaches to the Roman issues within a challenging intellectual matrix.36
Looking at Roman Art with Postmodern Eyes
At this juncture the reader might well ask, just what do these contemporary theoretical con-
siderations have to do with the Romans' ideas about artistic influence and originality? Is there
enough common ground to justify application of yet more contemporary concepts and values
to Roman situations? One might answer that we cannot escape from applying contemporary
concepts and values to our inquiry into the past. Indeed, this book itself demonstrates that
point. Yet, given the traditions of scholarship, it seems prudent to provide some historical
perspective for these questions and to modify our theorizing accordingly.
Modernism has never been comfortable with copying nor even with acknowledging ar-
tistic influence deferentially. In the literary realm as early as the late eighteenth century writ-
ers experienced what Harold Bloom has called the "anxiety of influence" as they struggled to
find their own voices in relation to those of their precursors.37 An even stronger reaction was
registered by artists of the twentieth-century avant-garde who radically rejected past models
and practices as a means to achieving individual creative expression. Certainly the Romans
would have found the modern rejection of the influence of predecessors peculiar, perhaps
even foolish. To judge from authors like Livy and Vitruvius, for the Romans building upon
past models, or exempla, was de rigueur. Two passages suffice to illustrate the centrality of
past experience and models to Roman ways of thinking about cultural development, moral-
ity, and educational progress in the early years of the empire (emphases added).
35 Marvin (as n. 26) raises a similar question. patrons, and the public were or were not concerned
with originality as an artistic criterion. Many of the vi-
36 R. Spear, "Notes on Renaissance and Baroque Origi- sual changes that we formally analyze are inseparably
nals and Originality," in Retaining the Original (as n. 6) linked to theoretical, conceptual issues that spring from
97-99, captures an essential ingredient of our seminar's shifting attitudes toward originality or invention" (p.
deliberations in his discussion of the shifting attitudes 97). Spear's words apply equally to our study of classi-
toward originality in the history of art and the impor- cal antiquity. See also G. Ercole, Storia della critica
tance of taking them into consideration. "If our modern d'arte. I concetti di imitazione e di espressione nella
emphasis on the importance of artistic originality or our teoria e nella storia delle arti figurative (Milan 1992)
sense of what defines the original work of art versus a 10-11, who differentiates modern aesthetic criteria from
copy differs from that held during the Renaissance and those that prevailed from antiquity up to the age of
baroque periods, then we run a very large risk of impos- Romanticism. I am grateful to J. R. Mariotti for this
ing inappropriate values on many earlier artistic prod- latter reference.
ucts. Style and iconography have typically received most
attention in discussions and definitions of artistic peri- 37 H. Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Po-
ods at the expense of a consideration of how artists, etry (Oxford 1973).
12 ELAINE K. GAZDA
The study of history is beneficial and profitable for the following reasons. You behold
the lessons of every historical event as clearly as if they were displayed on a stone monu-
ment. From these you may choose for yourself and for your own community what to imi-
tate. From these you may decide what to avoid as shameful in cause or shameful in
result.... No state was ever greater than Rome, none was more pious or richer in fine
examples.
Livy, A History of Rome 1, preface 10 and 1138
But for my part, Caesar, I am not bringing forward the present treatise after changing
titles of other men's books and inserting my own name, nor has it been my plan to win
approbation by finding fault with the ideas of another. On the contrary, I express unlim-
ited thanks to all the authors that have in the past, by compiling from antiquity remark-
able instances of skill shown by genius, provided us with abundant materials of different
kinds. Drawing from them as it were water from springs, and converting them to our own
purposes, we find our own powers of writing rendered more fluent and easy, and relying
upon such authorities, we venture to produce new systems of instruction.
Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture, preface 7.1039
Operating within the conservative environment of the Augustan regime whose rhetoric
depended heavily upon the notion of a revival of past Republican practices and values, both
Livy and Vitruvius were no doubt to some extent reflecting this politicized posturing in rela-
tion to the past. Yet while we recognize their essential conservatism as in part politically mo-
tivated, we must nevertheless recognize both the appreciation of genius and invention and
the generative effect that such notions had in Roman society and even, as Livy's reference to
stone monuments implies, in the realms of art and visual communication.
Neither Livy nor Vitruvius advocates mindless imitation but rather thoughtful selec-
tion that involves an intellectual process. Both accept the authority of the past and believe
in the benefits of its lessons for the present. Yet in their openness to influence, in their
picking and choosing from past models in a deliberate way, without anxiety, Romans and
some postmoderns may well find a patch of common ground.40 In a sweeping, but I think
apt, statement quoted in the New York Times, Peter Brook, the well-known director of
theatrical productions, succinctly stated his untroubled acceptance of influence. 'One lives
in a field of influences, one is influenced by everyone one meets, everything is an exchange
of influences, all opinions are derivative." But he affirms the role of creative invention within
that field of influences. As he goes on to say, "Once you deal a new deck of cards, you've
38 "Hoc illud est praecipue in cognitione rerum salubre

alio genere copias praeparaverunt, unde nos uti fontibus
ac frugiferum, omnis te exempli documenta in inlustri haurientes aquam et ad propria proposita traducentes
posita monumento intueri; inde tibi tuaeque rei publi- facundiores et expeditiores habemus ad scribendum
cae quod imitere capias, inde foedum inceptu, foedum facultates talibusque confidentes auctoribus audemus
exitu, quod vites.... nulla umquam res publica nec maior institutiones novas comparare." Latin text from
nec sanctior nec bonis exemplis ditior fuit . . ." Latin Vitruvius. On Architecture, ed. F. Granger, Loeb Classi-
text from Livy, ed. B. 0. Foster, Loeb Classical Library cal Library (London and New York 1934) 68 and 70,
(London and New York, 1919) 6, trans. J. Shelton, As trans. M. H. Morgan, Vitruvius, The Ten Books on Ar-
the Roman Did: A Sourcebook in Roman Social History, chitecture (Cambridge, Mass. and London 1914) 197-
2nd ed. (Oxford 1998) facing p. 1. 98.
39 "Ego vero, Caesar, neque alienis indicibus mutatis 40 For commentary on Roman openness to influence, in
interposito nomine meo id profero corpus neque ullius the realm of religion, see J. Scheid, "Graeco Ritu: A
cogitata vituperans institui ex eo me adprobare, sed Typically Roman Way of Honoring the Gods," Harvard
omnibus scriptoribus infinitas ago gratias, quod egregiis Studies in Classical Philology 97 (1995) 15-31, esp. 29-
ingeniorum sollertiis ex aevo conlatis abundantes alius 30.
BEYOND COPYING 13
got a new deck of cards."'41

thing in common.42
But what of Roman authors
of Greek superiority in the arts? How do their views tally with our reading of Livy and
Vitruvius? Two passages from Virgil and Horace are among those most often cited in support
of the notion of Roman subservience to the Greeks in the realm of art.
Others, no doubt, will better mould the bronze

To the semblance of soft breathing, draw, from marble,
The living countenance, and others plead
With greater eloquence, or learn to measure,
Better than we, the pathways of the heaven,
The risings of the stars: remember, Roman,
To rule the people under law, to establish
The way of peace, to battle down the haughty,
To spare the meek. Our fine arts, these, forever.
Virgil, Aeneid 6.847-5343
Greece, the captive, made her savage victor captive,

and brought the arts into rustic Latium.
Horace, Epistles 2.1.15644
The words are powerful and clear. Virgil's "others" are, of course, the Greeks, and he por-
trays them as eminent in the visual arts (as well as rhetoric and astronomy), and Horace charac-
terizes Rome's artistic origins as thoroughly Greek.45 Historians of classical art have readily and
routinely accepted the distinctions these Augustan authors draw between Greek and Roman
and the hierarchy they seem to imply, and they have applied them, often uncritically, to their
evaluations of works of art in bronze and marble as well as to visual representations in other
media such as painting.46 In assuming the correctness of these distinctions, such historians do
41 Quoted in an International Herald Tribune, 30 June 44 "Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit et artis intulit
1998, reprinting of an article that first appeared in the agresti latio." Latin text from Horace: Satires, Epistles and
New York Times. I take Brook's second statement to mean Ars Poetica, ed. and trans. H. R. Fairclough, Loeb Classi-
that when one deals a deck of cards, the deck itself cal Library (Cambridge, Mass. and London 1929) 408.
changes and that this change constitutes a kind of in-
vention. 45 A. Henrichs, "Graecia Capta: Roman Views of Greek
Culture," Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 97 (1995)
42 There is, needless to say, no one universally accepted
243-61. In focusing on the late Republic, Henrichs draws
view of influence and originality. Spear's brief remarks
out conflicting Roman views of Greece and Greek cul-
in the publication cited above (n. 36) emphasize shifting
ture. He contrasts Roman admiration for Greek accom-
attitudes even within the same era. plishments of the past to Roman disdain for Greeks of
their own day.
43 ". .. excudent alii spirantia mollius aera,
(credo equidem), vivos ducent se marmore voltus; 46 Scholars have used these passages to justify their judg-
orabunt causas melius, caelique meatus ment of "Roman copies" as secondary works that, as
describent radio et surgentia sidera dicent: such, were not likely to deviate from their Greek models
tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento and, therefore, constitute legitimate evidence for recon-
(hae tibi erunt artes) pacique imponere morem, structing those models. In this context it is important to
parcere subiectis et debellare superbos." note that there has been a long tradition in the study of
Latin text from Virgil I: Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid I- classical art history of treating texts as authoritative in
VI, rev. ed. H. R. Fairclough, Loeb Classical Library
explaining what happened in the realm of visual repre-
(Cambridge, Mass. and London 1940) 566, trans. R. sentation. R. Brilliant's Visual Narratives: Storytelling in
Humphries, The Aeneid of Virgil (New York 1951) 173.Etruscan and Roman Art (Ithaca and London 1984)
14 ELAINE K. GAZDA
not attend to the fact that Virgil, at least, makes his pronouncement at the end of the most
literary book in the most ambitious epic the Romans produced. In other words, the statement
is an element in Virgil's own Roman fine art. Moreover, the words of Virgil and Horace, like
those of Livy and Vitruvius, were crafted for particular politically sensitive purposes, and they
deliberately represent the regime of Augustus as observant of traditional, conservative Roman
values-even while Augustus was turning Rome into a Hellenistic city of splendid marble. In
the environment of Virgil and Horace, statuary, paintings, and mosaics identified with the cor-
rupting luxury of the Greek east evidently were politically too dangerous, and too "foreign," to
serve as exempla for the Roman whose values (at least in the rhetoric of the Augustan age) were
to be rooted in the Republican past, its simplicity and its thrift. It was better to portray art as
foreign and to appeal thereby to the conservative element of Roman society. The conflict of
values, a kind of schizophrenia, between the acceptance and rejection of Greek art and luxury,
emerges sharply in the writings of this period.47
The words of Virgil and Horace thus certainly do not describe the fullness of the situa-
tion behind the political posturing, nor were they intended to. In an era when peace was at
issue and recently warring Roman factions had to be kept under the control of Augustus as
head of the Roman state, using the "otherness" of art as a foil for the greatness of the gift of
Roman governance seems an obvious ploy. Yet even here one senses that the Roman attitude
toward the accomplishments of "others" does not involve rejection so much as acknowledgment
of worthy artistic achievements and models but accompanied by a reluctance, for political
reasons (e.g., their association with the powerful generals and dictators of the late Republic),
to claim ownership of them.48 It is not possible, therefore, to construct a simple hierarchy of
Roman values by using these two literary passages.
More useful for rethinking the model that has led to devaluing so much of Roman artis-
tic production as uncreative are such passages as those from Vitruvius and Livy cited above.
Writing at roughly the same time as Virgil and Horace, both Livy and Vitruvius stress the
didactic value of past models, whether as in the case of Livy they be historical events, or, as
with Vitruvius, the many examples of ingenious skill compiled by his predecessors. A funda-
mental respect for the past and the belief in the value of its lessons for the present permeated
the broader arena of Roman life. This was no less true for Roman art and visual communica-
tion than for history, morals, and education.49 The lessons of the past were meant to serve as
a springboard to new invention.
marked a significant departure from this practice by where greed and luxury entered so late in its develop-
letting the visual material reveal its own dynamics. As ment, or where thrift and a modest standard of living
Brilliant demonstrates, they are often fundamentally were given such great respect." Latin text from Foster,
different from those that shape texts. As ought to be trans. J. Shelton (as n. 38).
clear from my use of ancient texts in this essay, I do not
intend to privilege them over the visual evidence. In- 48 p. Zanker, The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus,
stead, I intend to suggest a parallel between the atti- trans. A. Shapiro, Jerome Lectures 16 (Ann Arbor 1988)
tudes, common within the elite Roman culture, that passim, for an analysis of the role of art in fashioning the
favored a respect for past models, whether expressed image of Augustus's regime.
verbally or visually. In this context it is interesting to note
that Horace, in the passage cited above, refers to the lit- 49 In the latter realm we know a great deal about such
erary rather than visual arts. See Henrichs (as n. 45). attitudes from manuals on rhetoric. See Ellen Perry's
discussion in chap. 7 of this volume. As Perry's discus-
4 For example, the passage in Livy cited earlier contin- sion makes clear, expressions of respect for exemplary
ues: "nec in quam civitatem tam serae avaritia luxuriaque models are by no means limited to the Augustan era. See
inmigraverint, nec ubi tantus ac tam diu paupertati ac esp. Sen. Ep. 84 "On gathering ideas," and Quint. Inst.z
parsimoniae honos fuerit." "There has been no state 10.2.
BEYOND COPYING 15
Though I have argued here that

ences of the past Romans share
recognize that they profoundly
in this volume, many postmoder
and deal with it in largely ironic
tury Zeitgeist promotes a reth
nality in Roman visual culture.
"originality" in the Roman con
troduced by revisionist scholarship of the 1970s, to formulate even more nuanced under-
standings of how exempla were emulated and surpassed, and to what other ends they were
deployed.
The Seminar
Although our seminar of 1994 did not consciously follow in the path of the CASVA confer-
ence, in its crossing of temporal and geographic zones it in effect extended that model and in
its more concertedly comparative approach went well beyond it. Perhaps a brief overview of
the seminar's deliberations will serve to put my foregoing comments into context.
Over the course of seven weeks of intensive discussion, the seminar analyzed the values
and premises that underlie "the Roman copy" construct and considered how pertinent they
are to the Romans' own views. We focused in particular on the presumption of Greek aes-
thetic superiority prevalent since the eighteenth century, the preoccupation with originality,
and the question of anxiety over artistic influence. From recent studies of classical literature,
we tried to glean some notion of Roman attitudes toward authorship and originality and to
see how modern value systems are similar to or at odds with those of the Romans. Certain
elements of postmodern thought drawn from art history and the contemporary art world fig-
ured prominently in our discussions. Among these were the reversal of cultural hierarchies,
the selective appropriation as well as ironic and nonironic uses of past ideas and images, and
the primacy of the individual as author versus that of the "text." Taking as our point of de-
parture the challenges posed by the newer thinking about "Roman copies" and copies in
general, we analyzed many works of Roman classicizing art in an attempt to perceive further
nuances in the visual dialogue between images created in the Roman period and those that
may have served as their sources of inspiration. Blatant appropriation, as it occurred in the
1980s in postmodern art, and its acceptance as a creative act, suggested one way to locate the
expression of Roman invention in "copies" and other Roman works in the Classical tradi-
tion.5' We were also influenced in our thinking by scholarship on Latin literature, medieval
manuscripts, and spolia, on early modern art, and on neoclassical art of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. We did not go so far as to accept the "death of the author" or the
50See Weisberg, chap. 1 in this volume. ist, which foregrounds his or her stylistic individuality
in the ways in which the copy differs from the work cop-
5' For example, in the 1988 CAA conference entitled ied. Benjamin's views are cited by Krauss in "Retaining
"Recycled Images: Citations and Appropriations of the Original?" (as n. 27) 7. On this topic see also R. Ben-
Style," Roger Benjamin reconciled copying to the mod-
jamin, "Recovering Authors: The Modern Copy, Copy
ernist valuing of originality by claiming that the act Exhibitions
of and Matisse," Art History 12 (1989) 176-
copying produces something unique to the copyist-art- 201. I thank Patricia Simons for the latter reference.
16 ELAINE K. GAZDA
impossibility of personal creativity. Rather, we attempted to envision the circumstances in

which Roman artists and craftsmen worked. Not only embryonic theories of artistic original-
ity and "genius" but also the realities of workshop practice of early modern and modern
sculptors and painters, who were deeply engaged in the study of ancient and other proto-
types, presented suggestive possibilities. The expectations of sixteenth-century and later pa-
trons and critics, who became increasingly sensitive to and demanding of what they were
paying for-originals by the master or his retouchings of copies made by assistants, genuine
antiquities or restored, even forged, works-offered further insights into the foundations of
twentieth-century expectations and how they largely differ from those of the Romans. We cast
about for appropriate vocabulary to express our observations and often nontraditional views.52
In short, during the course of the seminar we increased our awareness of intellectual and
other filters that have conditioned thinking about artistic originality and influence in classi-
cal antiquity, and we searched for alternative theories to account for them in what we viewed
as a complex, dynamic, and ongoing dialogue between Greek and Roman art. Recent theo-
ries of artistic copying, imitation, appropriation, allusion, emulation, and intertextuality de-
manded that we continually reevaluate both our received and newly posited theories about
Roman art. Ultimately, a plurality of views and approaches emerged rather than a single con-
sensus on theoretical matters. This diversity is evident in the essays that follow.
Since 1994
At the time our seminar convened in 1994 the shift of emphasis toward a Rome-centered
investigation of "the Roman copy" had not by any means come to be the dominant trend, but
it has picked up momentum since then. A gratifying number of significant studies have ap-
peared. These have addressed a variety of topics including Roman aesthetic criteria, histori-
ography, archaizing, neo-attic reliefs, multiples in wall painting, the aesthetics of sameness in
relation to the construction of elite identity, idealized body types used for portraits,
intertextuality and semantics, and time-specific studies.53 Collectively, this scholarship marks
52 Our use of the term "emulation," for instance, is meant

ology 10 (1997) 427-40 and "Description vs. Prescrip-
to signal the shift away from the traditional, narrow in- tion: A Semantics of Sculptural Style," in Stephanos: Stud-
vestigation of "mechanical copying" as a passive pursuit ies in Honor of Brunilde Sismondo Ridgway, ed. K.
toward a more broadly conceived analysis of artistic Hartswick and M. Sturgeon, University Museum Mono-
agency couched in terms of retrospection and creative graph 100 (Philadelphia 1998) 69-77. Fullerton (1997)
response. In this we build upon the ideas introduced by makes a strong case for applying the concept of
earlier revisionist scholars like Wiinsche (as n. 21) and intertextuality to the study of Roman art and its sources.
Trillmich (as n. 21), who employ the concept of aemula-
tio. In the seminar, we tried to talk about Roman art with- 53 B. Bergmann, "Greek Masterpieces and Roman Rec-
out using freighted terms like copy and replica but in- reative Fictions," Harvard Studies in Classical Philology
stead substituted ones like repetition and retrospective 97 (1995) 79-120; Perry (as n. 16);Jaros (as n. 7); M. M.
images, series and editions. See Soll (as n. 28) 37 for com- Lindner, "The Vestal Virgins and their Imperial Patrons:
mentary on the potential for creating "philosophic con- Sculptures and Inscriptions from the Atrium Vestae in
fusion" when the English word copy is used to describe the Roman Forum" (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan
something that is not actually copied, such as the indi- 1996); Trimble (as n. 9), L. Touchette, The Dancing
vidual prints in an edition of lithographs. A similar sort Maenad Reliefs: Continuity and Change in Roman Cop-
of confusion clouds our use of the term copy to describe ies, University of London, Institute of Classical Studies,
Roman sculptures as "Roman copies." For recent dis- Bulletin Supplement 62 (1995); Fullerton (as n. 52); S.
cussions of the importance of terminology in the study Dillon, "Repetition and Variation in Ancient Art," Jour-
of classical art, see M. Fullerton, "Imitation and nal of Roman Archaeology 10 (1997) 441-46. C. Hallett,
Intertextuality in Roman Art," Journal of Roman Archae-
"The Roman Heroic Portrait" (Ph.D. diss., University
BEYOND COPYING 17
a major advance in opening new possibilities for understanding "Roman copies" and ideal
sculpture in something closer to Roman terms. Even now, however, though many more schol-
ars have taken up the study of "Roman copies" and other visual multiples in their Roman
contexts, many others still approach such multiples as rote imitations, removed from their
Roman context to serve the practitioner of Kopienkritik as primary evidence for reconstruct-
ing lost Greek works.54 And so, some six years after our seminar and follow-up workshop
took place, there is still a need to address the problem of "the Roman copy" in its many
dimensions and manifestations.
The Book
While in the seminar we ranged freely over the vast and open landscape of artistic originality
and tradition, sometimes exploring without restricting ourselves to a particular path, in this
book we attempt to map a clearer route through that terrain by focusing on a series of goals.
The first of these is to ask how since Roman times, but especially since the Renaissance, we
have come to value originality over emulation, originals over copies, Greek over Roman, Chris-
tian over pagan (mostly Roman), and authentic over restored works, and, further, how these
values have entered into our assessments of Roman art, especially in the realm of multiple,
appropriated, and retrospective imagery (chapters 1-4). Another goal is to problematize some
of the premises associated with the practice of Kopienkritik-such as the concept of the Greek
bronze original and the notion that certain technical details, such as structural supports, can
indicate that a marble statue copies a Greek bronze original-for these continue in some
circles to be impediments to approaching Roman works as something other than mechanical
copies (chapters 5-6). A third goal is to consider what the Romans themselves thought about
"copies," what they admired and valued in visual art, and, in doing so, to determine as best
we can what the range of Roman audience reactions might have been to "copies" and other
retrospective creations (chapters 7-8). The final goal of this book is to present several case
studies of sculptures and paintings that build upon the work of the seminar and employ a
variety of analytical strategies-historiographic, spatial, sociohistorical, functional, gender-
based, iconographic, typological, and archaeological-to get at the function and meaning of
Roman imagery created in the Classical tradition (chapters 9-12).
The title and structure of this book require some clarification. The Ancient Art of Emula-
tion, which is more general than the title of the seminar ("The Roman Art of Emulation"),
signals a shift of emphasis. Though the art of the Romans remains our focus, the word An-
cient alludes to the broader context within which we attempt to investigate issues of artistic
originality and tradition in relation to Roman art. Accordingly, it is meant to incorporate the
of California at Berkeley 1993); E. D'Ambra, "The Cal- American Collections (Cambridge, Mass. 1996).
culus of Venus: Nude Portraits of Roman Women," in
Sexuality in Roman Art, ed. N. B. Kampen et al. (Cam- 54 C. Hallett, "Kopienkritik and the Works of Poly-
bridge, U.K. and New York 1996) 219-32; Marvin (as n. kleitos," in Polykleitos, the Doryphoros, and Tradition,
14); B. S. Ridgway, "The Study of Classical Sculpture at ed. W. G. Moon, Wisconsin Studies in Classics 4 (Madi-
the End of the Twentieth Century," American Journal of son 1995) 121-60, critiques yet defends and applies the
Archaeology 98 (1994) 759-72; E. Calandra, Oltre la methodology. See also Pollitt (as n. 10) and Marvin (as
Grecia: Alle origini del filellenismo di Adriano (Naples n. 14), who critiques a number of recent studies of the
1996). See also Mattusch (as n. 34) and C. Mattusch, The works of Polykleitos that rely heavily upon the methods
Fire of Hephaistos: Large Classical Bronzes from North of Kopienkritik.
18 ELAINE K. GAZDA
Roman period but also to imply

Roman era. The deliberately unorthodox structure of the book reflects this concern as well.
The reverse chronological order of the chapters, which places those on more recent periods,
theories, and methodological issues before those focused on antiquity, reflects my desire as
editor to call attention, in almost stratigraphic sequence, to the layers of postclassical thought
through which we have come to imagine antiquity. In the spirit of the seminar, I intend to
emphasize the need to acknowledge their inescapable presence and inevitable influence. All
but one of the chapters on Roman art are devoted to sculpture because it is in respect to this
medium that the problem of judging Roman classicizing visual images as mechanical copies
has been-and remains-most acute. One chapter on Roman painting serves to remind us
that wall paintings, particularly those of the Fourth Pompeian Style, have been subject to a
similar set of biases, even though many of the paintings that have survived are still in their
original locations, and scholars have, in consequence, more often taken into account their
Roman social contexts in assessing their function and significance.55
Chapter Summaries
A summary of the contents of chapters illustrates in greater detail the ways in which the au-
thors of this volume contribute toward the goals I have outlined above. The first four chap-
ters of the book focus on aesthetic criteria and values concerned with emulation in art, espe-
cially in relation to a work's response to earlier models. The authors identify a number of
lenses through which the art of classical antiquity has been viewed from the early modern
period to the present and speak to the resultant criteria by which it has been judged.
In chapter 1, Ruth Weisberg presents her views on contemporary emulative practice from
her perspective as a practicing artist and critic. Postmodernism has encouraged the reevalua-
tion of relations between cultures once regarded as dominant with those regarded as subor-
dinate and has fostered the reordering or elimination of hierarchies and cultural biases. In
doing so it has opened new prospects on many cultural/political relations, including the Greek/
Roman one. Moreover, postmodernism sanctions the appropriation by contemporary artists
of earlier works of art, particularly for purposes of ironic statement. Yet, Weisberg contends,
it has not provided an adequate model for reevaluating a fuller spectrum of relations be-
tween new art and old, between creation and tradition.56 Weisberg claims that the premium
placed on individual creativity and originality, tenaciously maintained throughout the twen-
tieth century through filters such as that of the avant-garde, causes us to devalue nonironic
references to the past, references that pay homage to the past and play upon the rich layering
of memory and tradition. In exploring her own position as an artist in relation to the domi-
nant contemporary tendency toward devaluation of the past, Weisberg focuses our attention
on changing attitudes toward and definitions of originality and its value in different periods.
She makes clear how suppressed the straightforward referencing of the past, or tradition,
still is today, in the wake of postmodernism's ironic appropriations. In bringing these issues
"5See Lippold (as n. 18) and Bergmann (as n. 53). the viselike grip of the original/copy binary, it too is lim-
ited in what it provides for an artist like Weisberg, whose
56 Although Krauss's fragmentation of the notion art
of is intimately engaged with concepts of memory and
the
unitary "original" presents a way of disengaging from continuity.
BEYOND COPYING 19
to the foreground, Weisberg raises our collective consciousness about the powerful modern
filters that we are in danger of failing to recognize. They are so much a part of our own
culture, our learned experience of the art of our own time, that we do not even notice them.
She thus illuminates our position as critical thinkers on the topic of originality at the end of
the twentieth century and reflects on our ability to address these issues without bias when we
deal with the visual culture of the past. In provoking us to consider how postmodernism, in
theory, can open paths for rethinking the value of Roman art hitherto devalued, Weisberg's
essay also cautions that the road is still strewn with obstacles.
Chapter 2 by Alice Taylor is not so much about originality and tradition as it is about
nineteenth-century value systems and socioeconomic factors that motivated and conditioned
the construction of categories that linger in the scholarship even today. Taylor shows how the
categories of Greek and Roman, Christian and pagan work in the case of a particular statue
type, a shepherd carrying a sheep on his shoulders, and how those categories depend more
on external criteria related to nineteenth-century aesthetic, political, religious, and economic
concerns than they do on archaeological evidence or criteria internal to the statue type. In
analyzing the problem of labeling, Taylor revisits some of the principles and premises of
Kopienkritik as they apply to the problem of misidentifying shepherds and introduces a new
dimension of the problem, that of Christian influence. While in the case of one shepherd (in
the Museo Barracco), a Greek label was evidently seen as better than a Roman one, in the
case of two others (at the Vatican and in San Clemente) a Christian label was considered
better than a pagan (i.e., Roman) one. Thus, her essay extends the reach of the volume and
transposes the problem of judging Roman products as inferior into another key. In the case
of the San Clemente shepherd, its erroneous identification as St. Peter was motivated by the
political and economic issues facing the Irish priests of San Clemente in the later nineteenth
century rather than by the available archaeological evidence, which favored a "pagan" iden-
tity. For validating the institution of San Clemente and the claims of its prior, a Christian
label was better than a pagan one and St. Peter better than an anonymous Roman shepherd.
Though in the case of the San Clemente shepherd these labels were ultimately reversed, they
were never completely discarded.
Chapter 3 by Nancy Ramage takes up questions of originality and authenticity in the
context of eighteenth-century sculptors' practices geared to satisfying the prevailing taste for
antiquities in completed form. In contrast to the growing disdain of copies of contemporary
artists' work, when it came to antiquities copies, restorations, pastiches, casts, and-unwit-
tingly-fakes were eagerly acquired to decorate the public rooms and gardens of aristocratic
houses throughout Europe. Even the best sculptors engaged in producing such "antiques,"
and their work could command high prices. Ramage examines the often questionable prac-
tices of restorers and the problems their work presents for the modern scholar and museum-
goer who want to understand Greek and Roman art. But rather than advocate the now common
practice of removing old restorations from ancient fragments, or consigning such altered works
to storage, she argues that restored works should be appreciated as the modern creations
they are. Instead of disparaging them as distortions of ancient works, or worse, mistaking
them as valid expressions of Greek or Roman sensibilities, they should be regarded as col-
laborations between the ancient sculptor and the restorer. For the scholar intent on recon-
structing lost Greek originals, the message here is certainly a cautionary one. It is far better, in
Ramage's view, to value the restored work as a modern document one that refects the tastes
20 ELAINE K. GAZDA
of its owner and talents of its restorer. Recalling Weisberg's essay, Ramage in essence seeks
an appreciation of these works as nonironic appropriations.
Richard Spear, in chapter 4, "di sua mano," dissects the development and complexity of
the value-laden concept of the artist's hand from the fifteenth through the seventeenth cen-
tury. This period is critical to the formation of many of the aesthetic and other values related
to originals and copies that were inherited by the eighteenth century and codified by
Winckelmann and others whose writings on ancient art were so influential in shaping nine-
teenth- and twentieth-century ideas and methodologies. As a technical term in patron-artist
contracts, di sua mano, Spear shows, did not refer to the exclusive "hand" of the artist but
allowed for the work of one or more assistants whose work would be "retouched" by the
master. Di sua proprio mano, in contrast, stipulated a much greater degree of the artist's own
participation in executing a given commission. Yet the two could be amalgamated at times,
and to add to the potential range of understandings, there was yet another meaning of the
term "hand," which since the fifteenth century had referred to the artist's personal style, or
maniera. The development toward the Romantic concept of the artist's "unfettered genius"
was not by any means a straightforward one. Spear also addresses the seventeenth century's
increasingly negative attitude toward copies, especially those of low quality, but, as he points
out, while connoisseurs were making finer and finer distinctions between copies and origi-
nals, some artists were finding it to be in their financial interest to blur them.
These four chapters, then, help us see more clearly how certain values concerning origi-
nality and authorship came to dominate art criticism since the Renaissance and to think about
how those values have affected the ways in which multiples in Roman art have been studied.
These chapters prepare the reader for the rest of the volume, which focuses on issues in rela-
tion to the study of "Roman copies." Accordingly, the next two chapters address the second
goal of this book, which is to problematize some of the familiar assumptions of Kopienkritik
that bear on the matter of originals and originality. Two of those assumptions are (1) that
there was "a Greek bronze original" to be copied and (2) that we can tell that a Roman marble
statue was copied from a bronze original if struts are present in the marble "copy," for they
indicate that the copyist had to support the stone at points in the composition where no
supports would have been necessary in the bronze.
In chapter 5 Carol Mattusch confronts the value-laden construct of the "Greek bronze
original" head on and questions the procedure of looking through "Roman copies" that it re-
quires in search of the desired lost work. Mattusch looks at the realities of the production of
bronze sculptures in Classical Greece and comes up with a very different scenario, one that
entails the serial production of repetitive images, reminiscent of the notion of multiples with-
out an original. Citing the reproductive nature of the bronze casting process, the economics of
the sculptor's workshop, and modern parallels, Mattusch argues that Greek bronzes were more
likely than not produced in series or editions of multiples. Working models of standardized
body types could be altered in the wax. Limbs could be repositioned, heads turned, and so on.
Greek sanctuaries and cities, she argues, were full of what amounted to slightly varied versions
of familiar body types, the identities of which were made known by inscriptions, not by the
unique character of each statue. Mattusch encourages us to imagine workshops with ready-
made statues on hand for sale, not, for the most part, unique originals, though the occasional
special commission was undoubtedly fulfilled. Most bronze statues, she believes, were familiar
images with broad appeal, different versions or copies of standard types. How far versions or
BEYOND COPYING 21
variations, such as the Riace br

that so preoccupies modern schola
In chapter 6 Mary Hollinshead g
tion and significance of structura
to be proof that such Roman w
and assumptions that flow from
structural supports in Roman ma
meant to be ignored or hidden, an
"Greek original." Far more prod
these supporting members as en
variety of options for contrivi
designs that had been worked o
virtuosity (a quality valued by
iconographic elements of the co
criteria of negative judgment, Ho
ingenuity" that permit marble sc
ingwithin an inherited tradition
The value and place of traditio
Roman collecting and viewing pra
whose essays address the third
sidered admirable in visual art an
ous kinds of retrospective work
ues and, more specifically, on R
innovation, wherein the doctri
central place. The "aesthetics of
rhetorical and other texts, judged
and display various subjects. Fa
reflect poorly on the patron or e
tant as decorum nor, by extens
today. Although the approval o
tism of Roman art, it does not
tion on the Roman scale of aest
degree of condemnation of the
lishedmodel, while approved of
tion. Imitation that resulted fr
made his own in creating an ap
ideals. Because no one model w
point of view be bound to fall sh
the artist would aim to emulate
priateness, Perry contends, go
theory of aesthetics to a caryatid
In chapter 8 Michael Koortboji
points up a paradox. While the
ing creation in the Roman scheme
has come to define and epitomi
22 ELAINE K. GAZDA
of Roman sculptors, which ha

value. Koortbojian points out th
aged to be attentive to the rela
which Roman viewers apprehen
purpose of the statues' setting
cific well-known works of art, p
experience of viewing. In one
fame of a particular prototype
priateness of a statue to its pa
as Content," "Schema, Style, S
explores a variety of solutions to
shifting the traditional emphas
relation between a given work
sider the varied forms of atten
provide different kinds of cat
modate a more variable situation than has previously been described.
The final four essays present new readings of well-known sculptures and paintings-the
Ludovisi barbarians, the paintings of Achilles in the House of the Dioscuri in Pompeii; a
genre of youthful effeminate male statue usually associated with Praxiteles, and the Roman
Apollo Citharoedus. In chapter 9 Miranda Marvin performs an historiographic autopsy of
the scholarship on the Ludovisi barbarians (the so-called Gaul Killing Himself and His Wife
and the Capitoline Dying Gaul), which have long been thought to be copies of bronze origi-
nals from Attalid Pergamon, and the "Roman copies" of smaller sculptures of Gauls, Per-
sians, Amazons, and Giants, which have been similarly linked to the dedication of Attalos II
on the Acropolis in Athens. Her analysis disengages these sculptures from their presumed
second-century B.C. Pergamene models on grounds of deeply flawed arguments concerning
the identity of the subjects, details of reconstruction, context, and date. Marvin proposes
instead that the sculptures are Roman creations of the second century A.D., emulations of the
grand manner, the "baroque" style associated with the art of Hellenistic Pergamon, which
was widely employed around the Mediterranean in both Hellenistic and Roman times. While
this style represents a tradition that Romans were proud to advertise as part of their lineage,
she argues that it does not necessarily indicate that the sculptures are copies of Pergamene
Gallic monuments. In fact, she contests the identification of the figures as Gauls and instead
simply calls them barbarians. Marvin's new hypothesis associates the Ludovisi sculptures with
other Roman representations of their conquered enemies, such as those on the columns of
Trajan and Marcus Aurelius. In contrast to the Greeks, who more commonly portrayed the
victors, the Romans preferred to focus on the plight of the defeated. It is within the Roman
context, then, that the dying and suicidal Ludovisi barbarians ought to be seen-the context
that, in Marvin's view, best fits the available evidence.
Chapter 10 by Jennifer Trimble asks how wall paintings at Pompeii are to be explained if
not-as customarily they have been-as copies of lost Greek masterpieces. In reply she ex-
plores the spatial, cultural, and social contexts of two paintings of Achilles from the House of
the Dioscuri at Pompeii. The spatial context of the paintings of Achilles in the tablinum and of
two others representing the Dioscuri in the fauces suggests to Trimble a purposeful manipula-
tion of the viewer's experience. As he or she moved along the central axis of the house from
the fauces to the tablinum, the action built en route to a climax in the dramatic paintings of
BEYOND COPYING 23
Achilles. Trimble's cultural anal

senting Achilles on Skyros with particular attention to the transformations of the hero's gen-
der-from male to female and back to male-and the significance these had in terms of Roman
ideas of masculinity. The pendant composition, the Wrath of Achilles, depicts another defining
moment in Achilles' life, and together the two paintings evoke the extraordinary nature of the
hero who "transcends the bounds of mortal existence" and is even able "to perform the impos-
sible." Trimble reads this message in relation to the self-presentation of the owner of the house
within the context of the Roman patronage system. The visitor's experience, orchestrated by
means of the architecture, painted decor, and the salutatio ritual, presupposes a shared cultural
knowledge, which determined a reception of the paintings by clients and other viewers that
reflected well upon the owner's prestige as a patron and participant in contemporary elite cul-
ture. As for the issue of multiple representations of Achilles on Skyros in Pompeii, eleven in all,
Trimble concludes that they do not serve the enterprise of reconstructing lost Greek originals
at all well. Instead, she proposes that Roman painters played with established formulae that
perhaps only in particular details preserve the vestiges of an early prototype. The inventive use
of this "shared, vital, and continually evolving artistic vocabulary," however, suggests impor-
tant links between art and society in the Roman period.
In chapter 11 Elizabeth Bartman presents a nuanced formal analysis and social
contextualization of statues she identifies as "sexy boys," which have previously been regar
primarily in terms of their presumed derivation from Praxitilean or other late Classical Gr
prototypes. Instead, Bartman isolates compositional features, particularly those of posture,
gesture, facial expression, and coiffure, that characterize this distinctive genre of Roman statue
and communicate a latent homoeroticism, which is at odds with traditional Roman notions
of masculinity and respectability. Most statues of this type, however, were found in baths and
villas, contexts in which Greek cultural values played a prominent role and male homoerotic
encounters were condoned. Bartman regards this genre of statue as evidence of Roman anxi-
ety about gender roles and sexual identity and of the worldly internationalism of the Roman
elite in the imperial age. While such statues exhibit elements of late Classical Greek style,
they are a new invention for the Roman setting.
Finally, chapter 12 by Linda Roccos argues that a type of statue known as the Apollo
Citharoedus, formerly thought to derive from a fourth-century B.C. or Hellenistic prototype,
is a second-century A.D. Roman invention whose closest iconographic antecedent is to be found
in Neronian imperial imagery. The long-robed Roman Citharoedus, seen in isolation, is an
abstract symbol of poetic inspiration and cultivated taste rather than a component of any
particular narrative involving Apollo. It yields various shades of meaning, Roccos contends,
only in relation to other images in a sculptural setting. Her analysis of this image of Apollo in
the context of four Roman villas of the second century shows that in each sculptural setting
where the statue of the citharode Apollo appears with different sculptural companions-Diana
and Jupiter, the Muses, and Marsyas-the grouping suggests a distinct narrative context. Thus,
it seems that even when limited to a repertoire of familiar images, each villa owner had the
liberty of creating a unique visual statement by combining statues in ways that best suited his
or her own taste, social status, or even political connections. The owner's individuality comes
forward in the "imaginative reconfigurations" of individually conceived works.
The chapters in this volume pursue the recent paradigm shift from the study of "Roman cop-
ies after Greek originals" to the study of Roman sculptures and paintings of mythological
24 ELAINE K. GAZDA
and related subjects, and they

that we need to examine, modify, and even abandon many cherished notions about Classical
Greek art and to acknowledge the obscurantist effect these have had on our thinking about
art of the Roman era. They show that, while Greece is our starting point, we must recognize
the revivals of the classical vocabulary of subjects and forms throughout the history of art in
the Western world-with Roman followed by Renaissance, Baroque, and Neoclassical down
to the present day. For, each time, the tradition is restated and transformed, and we can only
understand those transformations as products of their own time and place. The essays herein
underscore the fact that, in the case of Roman art, it is necessary to distinguish even more
clearly than we have done in the past what "originality"-or invention-meant in that cul-
ture from what our Romanticist/modernist expectations have led us to expect in the present.
We have until recently sought Roman originality in the guise of "Romanitas," but most often
in relation to portraits and historical reliefs and without defining originality in suitably Ro-
man terms. For many Roman sculptures and other works that have been excluded from that
investigation, the issue of originality is better framed in terms of aemulatio, which we trans-
late here as emulation. This Roman concept of invention was deeply rooted in those artistic
achievements of the past, which the Romans themselves regarded as exemplary and which
they willfully adopted as their models and sources of inspiration. A framework that embraces
active agency on the part of Roman artists and patrons (e.g., selective appropriation and emu-
lation) rather than passive reception (e.g., copying) is more useful and appropriate for envi-
sioning Rome's inventiveness in its dialogue with its Greek artistic heritage.
Although contextual analysis is now widely practiced in ancient art history, the context
that we perhaps have most neglected in our study of classical sculpture is our own-that of
the late twentieth century-the era of postmodernism and multiculturalism from which the
very questions we ask arise and by which our answers are consciously or unconsciously in-
formed. This book expresses the conviction that a deeper understanding of the theories and
historiography of classical archaeology and art history, and a heightened consciousness of
our own position with respect to this history, based on our own cultural and theoretical as-
sumptions, can benefit our efforts to understand the art of the classical world on its own
terms. Through their multifaceted explorations, the authors hope to have contributed to-
ward an improved understanding of Roman notions of artistic originality, which, in contrast
to our own, were firmly rooted in the traditions of their past.

Beyond Copying Artistic Originality and Tradition - Introduction Book

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Introduction: Beyond Copying: Artistic Originality and Tradition

Author(s): Elaine K. Gazda

'The members of the seminar, named in the acknowl- Roman antiquity.

To help achieve a greater bre

earlier, now-lost Greek ones,

"The Roman Copy": A Brief Historiography

10 There are still formidable defenders of this view such

16 In the late nineteenth century Heinrich Brunn, who

their own right.'8 By introdu

18 G. Lippold, Kopien und Umbildungen griechischer

of Raphael and La Fornarina, el

Looking at Roman Art with Postmodern Eyes

38 "Hoc illud est praecipue in cognitione rerum salubre

got a new deck of cards."'41

Others, no doubt, will better mould the bronze

Greece, the captive, made her savage victor captive,

Though I have argued here that

impossibility of personal creativity. Rather, we attempted to envision the circumstances in

52 Our use of the term "emulation," for instance, is meant

Roman period but also to imply

variations, such as the Riace br

of Roman sculptors, which ha

Achilles. Trimble's cultural anal

and related subjects, and they

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