READING REPLICATIONS: ROMAN RHETORIC AND GREEK QUOTATIONS

Adolf Furtwangler's concept of Roman copies and lost Greek originals has been largely dismantled in recent scholarship. Nevertheless, Romans created a sophisticated visual vocabulary which included direct quotations of Greek models, as well as allusions to styles associated with particular periods or individual Greek artists. The art‐historical consciousness of Roman artists, patrons and visually literate viewers was not limited to the elite, but also pervaded works of private funerary art which often employed recognizably Greek compositions and body types for rhetorical effect in order to access abstract concepts of heroism, virtue and apotheosis. Ultimately, sculptural quotations and replications from the Greek are not symptomatic of a derivative and imitative artistic culture, but rather reveal a highly original and particularly Roman aesthetic of hybridity.