Classics & Art History

Of all the ways to integrate real human subjects with mythological subject matter on Roman sarcophagi, none was more direct than the strategy of mythological portraiture: the outfitting of mythological  figures with portrait heads featuring the facial features of real individuals. But if this mode of commemoration were to work, it required one thing: that the viewer be able to distinguish the heads of deceased humans from those of mythological characters at a glance.

The solution developed by Roman carvers was to separate these figures through the tooling of their hairdos: while the hair of mythic  figures was extensively drilled, that of the deceased was rendered solely with the chisel. This article examines how Roman sculptors thus invested sculptural technique itself with semantic meaning, as a contrast in tools and toolmarks was pressed into service as a language for artiiculating the ontological status – and with it, the representational function – of the various  figures arrayed on the coffin.

Interest in artistic borrowing and exchange between Greeks and their eastern neighbors has seen a recent resurgence, and research on works from the artistic border zones of the Eastern Mediterranean — works such as the Mausoleum, Alexander Sarcophagus, Nereid Monument, and ‘Graeco-Persian’ gems and seals — has proliferated.  A corresponding proliferation of new questions and methods for exploring this material, however, is less manifest.  Many projects continue under the assumption that artistic form can serve as a straightforward index for determining ethnic identity of artist or cultural affiliation of patron, or treat artistic mixture as a passive process, conceiving it merely as the unwitting absorption and haphazard blending of various visual vocabularies.

I suggest that a close reading of the so-called ‘Lycian Sarcophagus’, unearthed at the royal necropolis of Sidon in 1887, may help to expand our interpretive options when confronted with objects of apparently mixed artistic pedigree.  Attending to both iconography and political history, I propose that the monument’s deployment of Greek, Persian, and other elements was carefully orchestrated to speak to, and flatter, at least two different ethnic audiences, so that this most cosmopolitan of mercantile cities could proclaim its important role in the international arena of the fifth century while ensuring that it would offend neither victor nor vanquished.  I end by developing the methodological implications:  rather than a passive product of cultural interaction, artistic mixture in the Eastern Mediterranean sometimes represented a highly calculated political strategy, adopted when an object intended for state display had to reckon with disparate (and frequently hostile) viewing communities.

The prominence of mounted riders on the Parthenon Frieze continues to puzzle.  If the frieze was meant to evoke the Panathenaiac festivals, why include so many horsemen, when our literary accounts emphasize the ranks of foot-soldiers accompanying the procession?  And why show the apobates race as the sole contest, when it was hardly the central Panathenaic competition?  If the frieze was intended as a monument to those fallen at Marathon, every one a hoplite, why memorialize them as cavalry?  If the procession was to embody the city’s democratic ideal, then why allow the cavalry -- that traditional preserve of the aristocracy -- to dominate the field?  And if the frieze represents no Panathenaia but rather centers on Erechtheus’ sacrifice of his daughter, why include horsemen and chariots at all?

Often overlooked in discussion of the frieze are data provided by Pindar, Pausanias, and Corinthian coinage:  that Athena herself invented the bridle, and -- under the names of Athena Chalinitis and Athena Hippia -- even received cult on this account.  Close attention to the frieze’s imagery of taming and bridling, combined with technical analysis of the Parthenon’s extensive yet selective use of added bronze to highlight reins and bridles, reveals an artistic program which conspicuously thematizes the goddess’s civilizing gift.

A provocative development within Roman funerary art was the invention, in the late second and early third century AD, of techniques for differentiating the image of the deceased from those mythological figures with whom he shared pictorial space on the front of a sarcophagus.  The most popular involved singling him out by using different tools and techniques to render the hair:  while the coiffures of ancillary mythic figures are heavily bored and drilled -- indeed, thematize the drill -- the hair of the deceased is worked exclusively with the chisel, spared any trace of the drill’s bite.

This central yet under-analyzed convention, which structures the depiction of the dead on almost every metropolitan Roman sarcophagus of the third century, has yet to be adequately theorized.  To reconstruct its significance and trace its logic I suggest picking the phenomenon up at both ends, examining both its genesis in the late second century (which requires highlighting its unexpected departure from the conventions of contemporary imperial and private portraiture in the round), and its cessation in the early fourth (which demands addressing why pagan sarcophagi should cling to the convention until the very end of their production, when Christian sarcophagi abandon it a generation before).  The results:  what began as simply a means of identifying and isolating the deceased within a composition quickly gained currency as an affirmation of the fundamental gap separating mere mortals from mythic and divine figures, and was only abandoned as a new religion claimed to close this gap.  The history of the chisel/drill distinction in Roman funerary carving was thus intimately tied to the changing fortunes of pagan polytheism, whose central ontological divide, between mortal and immortal, it had given visual form.

The literature on repetition in Roman art is extensive but single-minded, focusing almost exclusively on the nature and status of Roman copies of Greek originals.  This is a pity, since it hardly begins to exhaust the uses Roman artists found for repetition.  If repeating elements can encourage the viewer to actively juxtapose and compare images which might otherwise be considered only in isolation, it can also serve other, more corporeal ends—such as bodily steering the beholder in a certain direction, encouraging her to move laterally along the work.  This phenomenon is observable in Roman painting, particularly in domestic murals decorating corridors and other rooms of passage:  one thinks, for example, of the Odyssey Landscapes, whose constant repetition of trees, boulders, and cliffs pointing in the same direction works to physically usher the viewer along the frieze (and down the hall) in the direction of narrative progression.  In such cases, then, we are dealing with a clear consonance between the somatic effects of visual repetition and the function of the object—in this case, a corridor—whose surfaces it adorns.

What, however, of other species of Roman artworks, such as carved relief sarcophagi, those objects whose scale of production and sheer cultural visibility overwhelms every other artistic genre of the third and fourth centuries?  To gain critical leverage, I propose focusing on a particular subgenre of these coffins:  the hugely popular Season sarcophagi.  These make an ideal test case, not just because of their characteristic repetition of near-identical personifications of the Seasons (usually four, but sometimes as many as eight) along the face of the frieze, but because the cyclical nature of the Seasons already implies (chronological) movement and passage.  This paper examines to what extent such Season sarcophagi employ the reiterated figures of the Seasons to translate this chronological movement into spatial terms, pulling the viewer along (and perhaps even around) the coffin in time with the Seasons themselves.  This in turn requires addressing several intersecting questions:  Are Season sarcophagi more likely to assume a rounded shape than a rectilinear one?  What do we make of those which change the order of the Seasons?  Under what conditions can their number be reduced to two, or increased to eight?  And how does the movement implied by the cyclical iteration of the Seasons sit with the static compositions of most other late Roman artworks, such as the frieze on the Arch of Constantine, which employs masses of repeated figures to instead stifle movement and fix all attention on the central hieratic figure?  The goal of this paper is an improved understanding of how repetition functions in late Roman art, its capacity to alternatively spur or cripple movement, and its occasional clash with the formal requirements of various genres.

A perplexing development sweeps over Roman sarcophagi of the Late Empire:  the unexpected 'Entmythologisierung' or “demythologization” of their imagery.  These relief-carved coffins had featured bold mythological scenes since the very beginning of their mainstream production early in the second century, when inhumation had replaced cremation as the favored means for disposing of the dead.  How then to make sense of this repertoire’s peculiar withering and subsequent abandonment on later specimens, as mythological narratives were truncated, gods and heroes were excised, and genres featuring no mythic content whatsoever -- such as the late third century’s endless procession of sarcophagi featuring bucolic shepherds and studious philosophers -- came to the fore?

Was it perhaps driven by a burgeoning Christian faith?  To put it more succinctly, was mythological relief a casualty of Christianization?  This explanation proposes that sarcophagi featuring seasons, shepherds, philosophers, and hunters gained in popularity because their imagery was religiously neutral and thus capable of appealing to both old pagan and new Christian clientele alike, a flexibility that the older mythological sarcophagi did not have.  To be mythless meant to be non-affiliated, and thus palatable to all.  In a time of religious transformation -- which for funerary art always means a time of market transformation -- this, so the argument goes, was a selling point.

Of all the explanations commonly offered for sarcophagi’s demythologization this is perhaps the most popular, with a pedigree stretching from Rodenwaldt (1921) to Zanker (2010), yet the argument itself has never been subjected to real scrutiny.  It rests on three fundamental assumptions:  (1) that Christians did actually purchase neutral/mythless ‘pagan’ sarcophagi for their own use; (2) that they did so in numbers sufficient to affect the repertoire of pieces that pagan workshops produced; and (3) that Christians continued to buy neutral sarcophagi even after Christian ones were available.  For critical traction on these assumptions this paper turns to a close examination of the surviving monuments themselves, supplemented by social scientific reconstructions of Christian expansion and purchasing power.  It argues that the archaeological record offers minimal evidence for Christian purchase of mythless sarcophagi, and that Christian numbers and purchasing power for most of the third century were simply too low to have contributed in any significant fashion to the shift in market production towards demythologized pieces.  A nascent Christianity, in conclusion, can have played no real role in the extinction of mythological imagery on Roman sarcophagi.

What was the allure of the so-called “bucolic” sarcophagi that so dominated Roman funerary output of the later third century?  Of those many thousands of coffins with figural scenes carved between 250 and 310 A.D., roughly every fourth one featured bucolic imagery; metropolitan workshops, it seems, could hardly crank them out quickly enough, and their scenes of rustic life amidst tranquil surrounds went on to define the Roman visual imagination of the late Empire.  Yet their popularity remains opaque.  What resonance would they have had?  What, actually, did these pieces *show*?  And who bought them?

Statistical analysis of the roughly 400 extant bucolic sarcophagi reveals definite patterns in the imagery, with a marked preference for depicting certain types of animals, landscapes, and activities over others:  purely pastoral scenes heavily outweigh the small number that incorporate agricultural activities; and among the former, sheep and, to a lesser extent, goats are far more commonly depicted than cattle or horses.  Gaining critical leverage on these patterns requires reconstructing the set of associations and assumptions that Roman viewers would have brought to bear on these pieces.  Here I marshal a variety of evidence, both literary (the writings of Livy and Cato on the tension between farming and herding; Varro’s treatise on agricultural practices; the rural social hierarchies related in the *Vita Donati*) and archaeological (the booming construction of great *horrea* in major cities during the second century; the ongoing shift in Italy’s rural economy towards agricultural over pastoral yield; bucolic motifs on Roman coinage).  The resulting picture makes it clear that -- contrary to the most commonly accepted theory for their popularity -- the scenes on bucolic sarcophagi were pointedly *not* intended to evoke the rural estates dotting the Roman countryside, nor did they mean to index the villas of Rome’s Senatorial class.  They strove, rather, to conjure up the romantic, hazy, and exoticized landscape of the Arcadian pastoral idyll, an atmosphere thickly Greek.  In abstract terms, these findings force us to rethink the third-century disappearance of mythological imagery from metropolitan sarcophagi.  They also, however, provide concrete traction in the ongoing debate over sarcophagi’s clientele, allowing us to specify which classes and social groups were indeed the intended market for these elaborate coffins.

The Athenian Acropolis has hardly lacked for scholarly attention from classical archaeologists and art historians.  Yet far from being exhausted, the site and its sculpture remains one of the most fruitful and productive areas of research within the field, in large part because the sheer wealth of material continues to lend itself to the most
varied methodological approaches, from technical analysis and iconography to epigraphy and mythography.  With this in mind our colloquium strives for topological rather than methodological unity, showcasing three pairs of papers chosen for their topical resonance and mutual illumination of common themes.

          Our first pair of papers — Catherine Keesling’s “A Phantom Acropolis Dedication? Kresilas' Idomeneus (Poseidippos P.Mil.Vogl. AB 64)” and Stephanie Pearsons’s “The Acropolis Anacreon and Athenian Claims to Ionia” — are devoted to freestanding sculpture.  While the former shows how careful attention to base inscriptions and epigrams can help in the reconstruction of lost works (in this case, one by Kresilas), the latter attends to political history and contemporary drama to reconstruct the reception of another dedication commonly attributed to the same sculptor.

          Our second pair — Rebecca Karberg’s “Images of Aglauros from the Athenian Acropolis” and Maggie Clark’s “Weaver and Warrior: Relating the Two Main Themes of the Parthenon Sculptures to Athena and the Athenians” — address the theme of mothers and wives, showing why the negotiation of virginity and maternity was a peculiarly site-specific problematic.  The first examines the Erechtheion, Parthenon, and objects scattered over the Acropolis for images of Aglauros and her sisters (those unwed mothers turned wives in Athenian myth); the second considers their non-mythical counterparts, the images of married Athenian women on the Parthenon’s east frieze, and makes sense of them through the chaste figure of Athena herself.

          If these first four focus on freestanding sculpture and material drawn from across the Acropolis, our third pair — Mont Allen’s “Bridled in Bronze:  The Prominence of the Horse on the Parthenon Frieze” and Peter Schultz’s “The Athenian Apobates Race and the Iconography of the Parthenon’s West Pediment” — are dedicated to the Parthenon itself.  Pursuing cavalcade and chariot race, both papers interrogate the frieze’s odd fondness for equine motifs, and both demonstrate how attention to these motifs reveals a west pediment carefully integrated into the sculptural program established by the frieze itself.

          Our respondent, Andrew Stewart, concludes our colloquium by contributing his own perspectives on these topics, drawing on his own work on epigrams and reception theory, gender, and programmatic ensembles within Greek sculpture.

The last half century has not been kind to Roman sarcophagi.  This is unfortunate.  As monuments, they are as characteristically Roman as portraiture and historical relief.  And in terms of scale of production and sheer cultural visibility, they overwhelm every other artistic genre of the third century:  private portraiture dwindles and historical relief all but disappears, yet this is precisely when the manufacture of sarcophagi reaches its zenith, absorbing vast amounts of marble, labor, and capital.  These hewn coffins and their sculpted images seem to have captured the imagination of an entire culture, and held
it for well over a century.  This alone should grant them a central position within the scholarship on Roman archaeology and art history.  Yet the last half century has seen them relegated to the periphery of the field, a specialist domain where few venture.

Thankfully the wind is shifting.  Recent monographs by Michael Koortbojian, Bjoern Ewald, and Paul Zanker have propelled mythological sarcophagi back into the spotlight, reminding material and cultural historian alike of their centrality for understanding the High and Late Empire.  In celebration of the program committee’s call for papers on funerary art, we are proud to offer a colloquium which gathers North America’s sarcophagus specialists for a series of papers showcasing their most recent work.

The presentations are intended to display something of the range of possible methodological approaches to the material.  Our first paper, by Bjoern Ewald (“Blood, Death, and Myth on Roman Sarcophagi”) explores the funerary function of myth on Roman coffins by investigating those mythological scenes which advertise their own internal funerary context.  Our second paper, by Kathryn McDonnell (“Inappropriate Myths: Inscribed Text and Sculpted Myth on Roman Sarcophagi”) gains critical leverage on the repertoire of carved scenes through epigraphical analysis of their accompanying inscriptions.  Our third, by Sinclair Bell (“Dionysus at the Circus: Scenes of Spectacle and Myth on Roman Sarcophagi and Related Monuments”) demonstrates how judicious comparison with non-funerary works can elucidate otherwise opaque imagery.  Our fourth, by Francesco de Angelis (“Unique Emotions? Roman Sarcophagi in a Comparative PerspectiveÓ”) extends the comparative approach, juxtaposing Roman and Etruscan pieces in order to bring out the social specificity of each.  And our fifth, by Mont Allen (“Drilling the Dead? Separating Mythological and Mortal on Roman Sarcopagi”) considers how Roman sculptors used chisel and drill to mark out mythic figures, turning technique itself into a conveyer of iconographic content.

Our colloquium concludes with discussion by our respondent, Michael Koortbojian.

The student of ancient art often faces a divided methodology, in which the study of subject matter dwells on symbolism and meaning but ignores the materiality of its objects, while the study of material facture and artistic technique dwells on physical properties but brackets questions of meaning.  Such lack of integration is understandable, but can cause problems when we assume that these separate domains map onto the conceptions of art held by ancient craftsmen and viewers themselves.  For in the gap between our approaches resides an entire dimension of ancient image-making, one that our bifurcated methods have conditioned us to miss:  the communicative potential of material and technique.  The time thus seems ripe for a session devoted to this central yet overlooked aspect of ancient artistic production.  To throw it into the sharpest possible relief, we propose a session of six case studies.  Each is devoted to a single important genre or medium; and each raises a different question about the intersection of facture and meaning within that medium.

Our first two papers focus on the symbolic associations accorded materials themselves:  Alessandra Giumlia-Mair’s “The Symbolic Significance of Metals and Alloys” documents how Greek and Roman metallurgists creating composite statues selected alloys not only for their working properties (as we might expect), but also for their symbolic associations; while Alexis Castor’s “Gilding the Lily” shows how changes in the cultural significance of both gold and animals during the Persian and Hellenistic periods shaped their intersection in jewelry.  The other three focus on the significance of technique:  Kenneth Lapatin’s “Intaglio to Cameo” details how the rarity of appropriate material for cameos, combined with the more exacting techniques of carving they required, affected their iconography and status vis-à-vis intaglios; Stephanie Pearson’s “From the (Back)ground Up” examines how the distinctive Gandharan method of relief carving led its sculptors to favor certain compositions and subject matter; and Peter Schultz’s “The Politics of Erasing Facture” demonstrates how erasing toolmarks and other traces of facture from stone sculpture could itself carry a political message.

Taken as a group, then, our papers cover five of the most important genres of artistic production in antiquity, and illustrate the manifold ways in which ancient craftsmen and viewers — both Greek and Roman, Persian and Gandharan — accorded meaning to material facture itself.

Bucolic sarcophagi, being the most popular genre of figural sarcophagi, occupy a central place in the history of Roman archaeology and art. But what did their imagery actually reference, and what was its allure? For traction this article proposes that we ‘listen to the silences’ in the imagery, paying attention to what is absent as well as present. Why, for example, were pastoral scenes so much more popular than agricultural ones? And why are there so very many with sheep — but so few with cattle? Focusing on these lacunae, I demonstrate, helps us to better reconstruct the valence that these objects possessed in the Roman visual imagination. In more concrete terms, this allows us to (1) gain a richer understanding of why bucolic motifs were so often combined with ‘philosopher’ imagery; and (2) address the extent to which the bucolic sarcophagi did or did not target the interests of specific political classes (with ramifications for understanding who bought them).