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Course: Ancient Mediterranean + Europe > Unit 6
Lesson 6: Late classical (4th century)How a famous Greek bronze ended up in Rome
The "Apoxyomenos," a famous Greek sculpture, was copied by Romans who admired Greek culture. These copies were displayed in public places like the Baths of Agrippa. The Romans' love for Greek art led to debates about public versus private ownership of such treasures. Today, museums grapple with similar issues about the origin and ownership of artifacts.
A conversation between Dr. Steven Zucker and Dr. Beth Harris standing in front of Lysippos, Apoxyomenos, Roman marble copy after Greek bronze original dating to c. 300 B.C.E. (Vatican Museums, Rome, Italy), and ARCHES video. Created by Steven Zucker and Beth Harris.
A conversation between Dr. Steven Zucker and Dr. Beth Harris standing in front of Lysippos, Apoxyomenos, Roman marble copy after Greek bronze original dating to c. 300 B.C.E. (Vatican Museums, Rome, Italy), and ARCHES video. Created by Steven Zucker and Beth Harris.
Want to join the conversation?
- if the scraper was a roman copy of a greek bronze who does it belong to?(3 votes)
- Let's start at the very beginning (a very good place to start). Greeks worked in Bronze, a metal that rusts. Bronze is also recyclable, so when government and military leaders who didn't appreciate art, but needed metal for weapons, needed it, bronze statues got melted down to make other weapons.
Romans who had seen the bronze statues admired them as art, and were wise enough to make their own out of carved marble which, apart from being great for statues, isn't a weapons-grade material.
Many marble statues in Rome are "greek style", but were never in Greece.
It's kind of like how the Apple Corporation designs its products in California, sources parts in Taiwan, Korea and Vietnam, and has the phones assembled in China. The resulting product is not really from any single place.(4 votes)
- they said 'booty' in the video what plays above at least on the date and time in space time i viewed it last(2 votes)
- The word is used in a different meaning from the one that is running through your mind. "Booty" means the stuff that a winning military force takes from the defeated side. It's kind of like when pirates take over a ship and steal all of its cargo. That's "booty."(3 votes)
- So, uh... they know that 5 year old girls (and boys for that matter) have access to these videos, right? they could at least blur out those statues' d*cks, couldn't they?(1 vote)
- Little boys and girls know about their own and each others' body parts. The statues are on public view in city squares and museums. Why not here? For insight into the project you suggest, search out articles on Bowdlerism and the term "fig-leaf".(4 votes)
- Greece is a place of art and has fragments the hole country is art so how can you say that its not unique ? the colture is so amazing and its culture(1 vote)
- "Unique" comes from the same word root as "unit", meaning "one-of-a-kind". All that a scholar need do is find another example of the same kind of thing to demonstrate that something is not "unique". Since Cyprus is not Greek, anything found in Cyprus that is of the same kind as that found in Greece, demonstrates that Greece is not unique.(2 votes)
Video transcript
(melodic jazz music) - [Steven] We're in the Vatican Museums looking at one of the most famous works in the entire Western tradition. This is a sculpture known
as the "Apoxyomenos," the "Scraper." - [Beth] By a very famous
ancient Greek sculptor named Lysippos, we're actually looking at an ancient Roman copy. - [Steven] So what we're
gonna try to answer in this video is how a major sculpture by a famous ancient Greek
ended up as a Roman copy in the Vatican in the
city of Rome in the third, the second and even the
first centuries, BCE. The Romans not only conquered Greece, but also its many territories and colonies and triumphant Roman generals brought back enormous
numbers of Greek sculptures and to a lesser extent,
ancient Greek paintings and even architectural fragments. - [Beth] Now the Romans were not unique in making off with booty during war, there was an age old precedent for that, but when the Romans confronted Greek art and brought it back to Rome, that was a transformational experience. In fact, Horace wrote that although the Romans
had conquered Greece, Greece through its culture conquered Rome, - [Steven] It symbolized a
great intellectual tradition, that Rome saw itself as
becoming the inheritor of. - [Beth] It signified a kind of luxury, a life of educated cultural refinement, that seemed very different than the current life of ancient Romans. - [Steven] So let's just walk
through how this would work. Rome would conquer an area,
perhaps a Greek city state, or perhaps simply an area that
had been allied with Greece and soon after objects that
were deemed worthy of import would be packed onto ships
and brought back to Rome, where they would often be
paraded through the city during a triumph. - [Beth] A triumph was
essentially an opportunity for a victorious general
to exhibit the booty that they had brought back and to celebrate their military victory and it would have given the agent Romans, who lived here in Rome and hadn't traveled to
these distant places, a sense of the wealth and
power of these places, that were being conquered
by the great Roman army. - [Steven] And then after the triumph, an enormous number of objects
would be put on public display in various parts of the city, but most famously in the Temple of Peace, just beside the Roman Forum. Now ancient Rome didn't have museums, but in a way places
like the Temple of Peace become a kind of proto-museum. So many of these Greek objects
had been used originally in religious or civic environments, but the Romans ripped them
out of their original context and made them aesthetic objects, made them objects of luxury. - [Beth] When objects are looted, whether we're talking
about the ancient world or the modern world, they often
lose that original meaning. - [Steven] And the "Apoxyomenos"
is a perfect case in point, we don't have its original location, we don't know from literature
or from any evidence, where this originally
would have been placed, the Romans took it and now it's here. - [Beth] But let's be careful, when we say the Romans took it, the Romans took the bronze original and because of this
developing love of Greek art, ultimately many copies were made of it, one of the most beautiful is
here in the Vatican Museums. So the "Apoxyomenos" is
brought to the city of Rome as war booty and it's set up by Agrippa in front of the baths that he built for the public here in Rome. - [Steven] And it was
in the Baths of Agrippa, that the Roman public really fell in love with this sculpture. The baths were essentially a public place and a place where the average Roman could see ancient Greek sculpture. - [Beth] So what Agrippa did
was considered to be generous, he was giving this to the people the way that a private collector today might donate a work to a museum, so it could be shared with the public. - [Steven] So you can imagine
how upset that public was, when the emperor Tiberius
took the sculpture from the Baths of Agrippa and
brought it to his own house, put it in his own bed chambers. - [Beth] Pliny says Lysippos
was most prolific in his works and made more statues
than any other artist. Among these is the man
using the body scraper, which Marcus Agrippa had erected
in front of his warm baths and which wonderfully
pleased the emperor Tiberius. This emperor could not
resist the temptation and had this statue
removed to his bed chamber, having substituted another
for it at the baths. The people however were so
resolutely opposed to this, that at the theater,
they clamorously demanded the "Apoxyomenos" to be replaced and the emperor not withstanding
his attachment to it was obliged to restore it. - [Steven] So the court of
public opinion was so loud, that the emperor actually
gave it back to the people, it speaks to the power of images, in a way the sculpture became a way of differentiating public
good from private greed. - [Beth] And this was part of
a long standing conversation in Rome among those like Cato and Cicero, who believed that this
booty that was taken should be available to the public versus those who took the booty
and kept it for themselves to decorate their private villas. - [Steven] And all of these
issues remain important today, our museums are filled with objects, that come from different places and many of those objects were looted. Museums are looking at
their collections now and wondering whether some of
them should be repatriated, that is returned to
their country of origin and in any case how their
meaning has been transformed by being taken out of
their original context and put into a museum, where their meaning is
completely transformed. - [Beth] The Romans were
not without sympathy for the conquered peoples, in fact, Livy wrote very sympathetically
about the King of Syracuse. If this King were to rise
from the realms below, with what words could we show
him either Syracuse or Rome, when after he looked back on his half-destroyed
and despoiled fatherland, he would see as he entered Rome in the vestibule of the
city, almost in the gates, the spoils of his own fatherland. - [Steven] So when we
look at the "Apoxyomenos" now on display in the
Vatican in the 21st century, we generally look at it as an
exemplar of ancient Greek art and too often, we forget the complex story of how this sculpture was
looted, how it was loved, how it was adopted by the Roman people, how it was copied and
ultimately ended up here. (melodic jazz music)