Roman Art and the Artist

Abstract

This chapter presents a survey on those responsible for Roman visual culture, especially in the late Republic and early Empire. The author aims at situating this search for the Roman artist within its particular disciplinary context. The chapter paints a decidedly ambivalent portrait of Roman artists. The various literary, archaeological, and epigraphic sources discussed construct a somewhat contradictory picture. On the one hand, the concept of the creative sculptor and painter is important for Roman late Republican and imperial writers. For most Roman authors, to talk of sculpture and painting was to talk in exclusively Greek terms. The chapter discusses the issue of signatures. That contemporary artists could adopt the names of their more illustrious forebears is clear from not only contemporary texts, but also extant material culture. Some artists perhaps did conceive of their profession in the elevated terms of their Greek forebears.

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