Roman Imperial Statue Bases: From Augustus to Commodus

ISBN-13: 9788779341463 / Angielski / Twarda / 2005 / 664 str.

Jakob Munk Hojte

Opis

Roman imperial portrait statues have attracted the attention of scholars since the Renaissance, and justly occupy a central place in the history of Roman art. Research has, however, focused predominatly on the extant portraits, while other documentary evidence related to the crection of imperial portraits such as literary sources, papyri, numismatics and in particular the epigraphis sources have not been explored to their full potential. This book offers an analysis of a corpus of 2300 statue bases for statues of the emperors from Augustus to Commodus (44 BC-AD 192) erected at nearly 800 different localities throughout the Roman Empire. This shows that imperial statues had a mu8ch wider geographical distribution than that of the presently known portraits. The statue bases futhermore reveal that the motivations and occasions for erceting imperial statues generally related to the dedicator of the statue rather than, as previously thought, to the emperor. This realisation has far reaching implications for our understanding of the function of imperial portraits.