Art and Archaeology

New excavations of villas and the reexamination of materials from 19th-and early 20th-century excavations have brought to light an interesting phenomenon of the Roman statuary " habit " : the collection and display of antique sculpture in late Antique villas of the western provinces. These collections range from early imperial mythological sculpture in fourth-and fifth-century villa contexts (El Ruedo, El Munts) to large assemblages that juxtaposed antique portraits with contemporary pieces (Chiragan, Montmaurin). My recent work in the Algarve situates the villa of Milreu (Estoi, Portugal) and its collection of imperial portraiture into ongoing discussions of the role of sculpture and the mediation of status in the Late antique domus. Over the course of a century of excavations at Milreu, archaeologists have uncovered three imperial busts of Agrippina the Younger (49–59 C.E.), Hadrian (117–138 C.E.), and Gallienus (253–268 C.E.). Though these portraits have received attention as art objects, previous scholarship has been hesitant to associate them with known occupation phases at the site, as none were found in the most recent stratigraphic excavations. Yet after a detailed examination of the finds and their ar-chival history, I believe that we can associate these portraits with Late Antique occupation levels. I also suggest that the collection of imperial portraiture was larger than has previously been assumed, given the presence of two second-century fragments wearing the paludamentum, and fragments of a colossal statue. Furthermore, the specific character of the Milreu collection, by virtue of its antiquity and imperial focus, challenges our conventional understanding of Late Antique landowners as a remarkably homogenous group, especially in the western Mediterranean. When these portraits are considered in context as a product of their local environment, it is possible to associate their collection and display with a specific sociological type of villa owner, who may not have been part of the imperial circle, as scholars often assume. Instead, I focus on the display of antique portraits as a form of classical reception and highlight universal values associated with these busts. I then suggest that the display of these imperial portraits evinces a dominus who sought to borrow the authority of the Roman empire to establish firmly his local preeminence. Through an examination of sculpture along with other evidence from Milreu's domestic assemblage, I suggest that local networks and peer-polity exchanges were powerful in the Roman Algarve and remind us that elite identity is constituted on both macro-and microlevels.

New excavations and recent scholarly analyses have brought attention to the collection and display of both antique heirloom and contemporary statuary in Late Antique villas of the western Roman empire. In highlighting sculptural assemblages found in private contexts, however, archaeologists have failed to provide a methodological definition for how we recognize a " collection " of statuary in an archaeological context. This paper examines scholarly approaches to " collection " in the ancient world, scrutinizing the villa of Chiragan and its statuary as a case study. Our understanding of collection in the ancient world is based largely on traditions and practices of art acquisition originating in Hellenistic court circles, which, to judge from Cicero's writings and Pliny's letters, subsequently influenced wealthy Romans in the late republic and early empire. Thus, texts on collecting practices are regularly used to interpret archaeological assemblages of sculpture as material evidence of elite status assertions and power maneuvers within a highly social world. Yet the link between texts and extant material culture is tenuous, and archaeological interpretations must stem from analysis of the objects themselves. With this in mind, I ask how we define " collection " in archaeology, since extant assemblages of sculpture vary greatly in both quantity and quality, and the demarcation between " assemblage " and " collection " is rarely clear. To test whether it is possible to establish guidelines for identifying antique collections of art, I examine the sculptures from the villa of Chiragan in southwestern France, where more than 200 pieces were excavated in the late 19th century. The assemblage includes sculptures from the first to fourth/fifth centuries C.E.: free-standing statues and statuettes, reliefs, and imperial and private portrait busts. Though recent studies have reexamined the villa's imperial busts and Late Antique mythological statuettes, the extant assemblage has not yet been fully synthesized. I present the villa's statuary and ask whether the discovery of sculptures at a single, residential site is sufficient proof to term them the vestiges of a larger collection of art. I further ask whether the existence of sets and groups of sculp-tural types within a larger assemblage adds or detracts from our understanding of ancient art collection and how we might move forward archaeological interpretations of Late Roman villas and their decor.

This article presents an analytical study of the Late Antique sculptural relief program at the Roman villa of Chiragan (Martres-Tolosane, Haute-Garonne), which includes a series of mythological panels and a portrait in relief. Although Chiragan's reliefs have long been associated with Aphrodisian workshops, this study marks them as products of a local workshop, based on stylistic traits and recent scientific analyses of the marble. Using comparanda found in a series of Late Antique portraits from Chiragan, I date the reliefs to the later fourth or early fifth century CE. I also consider evidence for an honorific relief portrait at the villa that, together with the program of architectural relief sculpture, makes explicit reference to a distinctly urban visual rhetoric. In conclusion, I argue that Chiragan's reliefs actively court association with the urban sphere, which in turn suggests the increasing importance of the villa as a sociopolitical locus in the Late Roman West.

Excavations in the Roman Southwest, in what is now Portugal, Spain, and southern France, have brought to light a diverse corpus of sculpture that was displayed in late antique villas, ca. 250-450 CE: monumental reliefs, mythological statues and statuettes, and portraits, of both private individuals and imperial personages. Although the production of some statues is roughly contemporaneous with the late antique villa in which they stood, many pieces were antiques, carved centuries earlier. But the diversity within and across these statuary assemblages, and the concentration of such finds in villas of Hispania and Gaul, have not been given a full treatment in modern scholarship. Rather, sculpture is interpreted generically as evidence for the elite status of a villa owner, leading to problematic assumptions that all statuary collections, and late-Roman villas more broadly, evince an indistinguishable class of “elite” Romans. This dissertation invites readers to reconsider the narrow b...

“Marble Statuary and the Discourse of Display in Late Antique Aquitania,” in Spätantike Ideal- und Portraitplastik. Stilkritik, Kontexte, naturwissenschaftliche Untersuchungen. Beiträge eines Workshop an der Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg 13.–16. 6. 2018, ed. Gunnar Brands and Hans Rupprecht Goette (Reichert Verlag, Wiesbaden: 2023) 165-84

The last century of archaeological exploration has brought to light many late antique villae (mid-3rd – early-5th centuries CE), and much has been made of the ways these sites visually reinforce the increasingly fraught patron-client relations that characterize the late antique world in scholarship. My paper challenges these assumptions, using material evidence to illustrate a more complex, symbiotic relationship between late antique villae and the rus. The late Roman countryside was stratified, but to presume an especially oppressive relationship between estates and rural populations is to perpetuate synthesis of this period as synonymous with decline, and to disregard more nuanced evidence in the archaeological record. I discuss cult structures on three estates in the Ebro River Valley in ancient Tarraconensis (Spain) to argue that villae courted and catered to sub-elite rural population groups, who were themselves receptive to such offerings. By highlighting these interdependenci...