Start with the purpose
Before comparing faces, ask what a statue was for. Greek sculpture mostly served religion and the city: statues of gods for temples, offerings in sanctuaries, athletes and grave monuments. Roman sculpture had those uses too, but also a strong social job. A Roman portrait told the viewer who a person was and what values he wanted to project, and it decorated houses, villas, baths and theatres as well as temples.
Greek: the ideal body
Classical sculptors such as Polykleitos built their figures on systems of proportion and balance, and gave gods and athletes bodies that no single person had. That is the Greek idea most people recognise. It is not the whole story: Hellenistic artists became interested in childhood, old age and even deformity, and made statues of fishermen, peasants and aged women. Greek art could be realistic when it chose to.
Roman: the real face
Roman portraiture has its own roots. Patrician families of the Roman Republic kept images of their ancestors, essentially death masks, in their homes. Republican portraits grew out of that tradition. The values that counted were public service, military courage and the authority that comes with age, so officials commissioned busts that showed every wrinkle and imperfection. Specialists call this style verism, from the Latin for “true”. A bust in the Metropolitan Museum, with its furrowed brow, piercing eyes, thin sealed lips and close-cropped military hair, shows the type; it was carved in the mid-first century CE, either copying a Republican portrait or reviving its style.
Roman portraiture did not stay veristic. Augustus combined the heroic idealisation of Hellenistic art with Republican likeness, and later dynasties swung between realistic and classicising faces to suit their politics. Hadrian was the first emperor to wear a beard in the Greek manner.
Greek bodies, Roman heads
The two traditions met in the same statue. Republican portraits were often heroic full-length figures with a generic, idealised body and a realistic head attached. Some Roman sculptures combine the image of a Greek god or athlete with a Roman portrait head, so that the meaning of the Greek type lent beauty, importance or a heroic air to the person portrayed.
Many “Greek” statues are Roman copies
As Rome expanded, its generals brought Greek works of art home as booty, and wealthy Romans soon wanted statues that evoked Greek culture. Greek and Roman workshops met the demand with copies of famous Greek statues, in marble and in bronze. Moulds were taken from the originals; solid plaster casts with many points of measurement guided the marble copies, which needed struts and tree-trunk supports because marble lacks the strength of bronze. By the second century CE the demand was enormous, from private homes to the niches of public baths and theatres.
Since most Greek bronzes were melted down, these copies are often our main evidence for the masterpieces of famous Greek sculptors. The marble Diadoumenos in the Metropolitan Museum, carved in the late first century CE, preserves a bronze by Polykleitos made some five centuries earlier. Some copies are exact, others are variants adapted to Roman taste, and some mix more than one Greek original.
Neither was white
Greek and Roman statues alike were once colourful, painted and richly adorned, so the white marble of museums is misleading for both. Their settings mattered too: a statue in a temple, a bath or a family atrium was read differently.
So what is the difference?
Greek sculpture, above all in the Classical period, built the language of the ideal body. Roman sculpture adopted that language, copied it on a vast scale, and used it for Roman purposes, adding the realistic portrait that carried a person’s identity. Looking at a statue, ask whether it shows a type or a person, and whether it is an original or a copy: the answers often tell you more than the label “Greek” or “Roman”.
Where to see them
The Metropolitan Museum in New York shows Roman copies of Greek statues side by side with Republican and imperial portraits; the Vatican Museums, the museums of Rome and the National Archaeological Museum in Naples hold many of the most famous copies. Check opening times before you go.
Sources
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History: “Roman Copies of Greek Statues” (2002); “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle”; “Art of the Hellenistic Age” (2007).
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, collection records 12.233, 25.78.56 and 09.39; press release for Chroma: Ancient Sculpture in Color (2022).
