The Greeks & the Romans.
“In Greek archaeology, any object you turn up is beautiful: in Roman you are delighted if you can argue it is second rate.” Arnold Gomme, Professor of Greek, 1959.[1]
A professor of Greek’s wry remark delivered to the British Museum captures something of the problems historians of Roman art have faced, in the words of Mortimer Wheeler, “Greek snobs.” This kind of attitude owes something to the stereotype of the Roman as the hard-headed military soldier, or the pragmatic businessman with an almost philistine disregard of the arts. Yet from reading Roman writers like Cicero, Virgil et al it is clear that the Romans greatly valued art though they also acquired much of it through conquest, so there were ulterior motives for its acquisition. As for the Greek question, to be fair, Roman art was indebted to the Greeks because it developed in “the cultural climate of Hellenism in a Mediterranean landscape saturated with the products of Greek civilisation.”[2] As mentioned last week, Greek colonies existed in parts of southern Italy and Sicily and it was inevitable that Greek style would provide a model for Roman artists.
[1] Quoted in Wheeler, Roman Art and Architecture, 23.
[2] D’ Ambra, Art and Identity, 10.
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