One empire, many workshops
At its largest, in the second century CE, the Roman Empire ran from Scotland to the Euphrates and from the Rhine to the Sahara. It was divided into provinces, each with a Roman governor, but most of its people were not Roman by birth. They spoke Greek, Aramaic, Egyptian, Celtic languages or Punic, worshipped their own gods, and had their own artists, some of them heirs to traditions far older than Rome.
Roman rule brought new things everywhere: town plans with forums and baths, temples on podiums, statues of the emperor, Latin inscriptions, mosaics. What happened next depended on the place. In the Greek East, Rome mostly adopted the art it found. In the West, where cities were newer, Roman forms often arrived with a local accent. The art of the capital itself, and how emperors used it, is in the guide to Roman imperial propaganda.
Why it was called “provincial”
For a long time “provincial” meant “second-rate”. Historians trained on Greek sculpture and on the official art of Rome measured everything else against them, and found the art of the provinces flatter, stiffer and less correct. In the twentieth century the Italian archaeologist Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli turned the question round: what looked like a failure to copy Rome could be a different way of seeing, closer to popular and local traditions, which he grouped as “plebeian and provincial” art.
That change of view is the key to the title question. A relief from the Danube or a mosaic from Dorset answers a different need from a statue in the Forum, for a different audience, with the skills and models at hand.
Egypt: pharaohs in Roman dress, Romans in Egyptian graves
When Rome took Egypt in 30 BCE, the emperors inherited the role of pharaoh. In the temples of the Nile, priests carved them in the old way, with the double crown and the offerings to the gods, as if nothing had changed. At Dendera, Philae and Kom Ombo, Augustus, Tiberius and later emperors appear as pharaohs on the walls. The small Temple of Dendur, completed by about 10 BCE and now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York, shows Augustus making offerings to Egyptian gods.
The opposite happened in private life. Between the mid-first and the mid-third centuries CE, families in the Fayum oasis and elsewhere had their dead mummified in the Egyptian way, but placed over the face a portrait painted on wood in the Greek manner, often in encaustic (pigment mixed with hot beeswax and resin). The sitters wear Roman hairstyles and jewellery. In 1888 the archaeologist Flinders Petrie found 81 of these portraits at Hawara alone. They are among the most direct faces to survive from antiquity, and they belong to no single tradition: they are Egyptian, Greek and Roman at once.
Syria: the faces of Palmyra
Palmyra, an oasis city in the Syrian desert, grew rich on the caravan trade between the Roman Empire and the East. Its families buried their dead in tower tombs and underground chambers, and closed each burial niche with a limestone bust of the person inside. Made from the first to the third century CE, the busts show men in Greek dress or local costume and women covered in jewellery, with names in Palmyrene Aramaic carved beside them.
The style is Roman in its idea (a portrait of the deceased) but local in its look: large frontal eyes, flat folds, crisp ornament, much closer to the art of the Near East than to Rome. Palmyra’s great Temple of Bel, a Roman-period building for a Semitic god, was blown up in 2015 during the war in Syria, along with other monuments of the city. The busts scattered in museums around the world are now among the best ways to see its art.
Gaul and the West: Roman forms with a local accent
In southern Gaul, Rome built in its own image. The Maison Carrée at Nîmes, dedicated around the turn of the era to Augustus’s grandsons Gaius and Lucius Caesar, is one of the best-preserved Roman temples anywhere, a perfect example of the type with podium and front porch. Nearby, the Pont du Gard carried water to the same city.
Further north and in the countryside, the mix was deeper. Gallic gods were given Roman names and statues, and Roman gods acquired Gallic companions. The horse goddess Epona, worshipped across Gaul and by the cavalry, was carved in a Roman way but remained a local figure. The habits of Iron Age decoration, described in the guide to Celtic art, sometimes surface in the patterns of Roman-period metalwork.
Britain: a Gorgon with a moustache, and a face that may be Christ
At Bath, the Romans built a temple to Sulis Minerva around a sacred hot spring, explained in the guide to why the Romans built a temple around a hot spring. In the centre of its pediment is a Gorgon’s head. In Greek myth the Gorgon is a woman with snakes for hair; here it is a man, with a moustache, a wild beard and staring eyes, closer to a Celtic water god than to Medusa. Few images show so well how a Roman motif could be reimagined by a local sculptor.
Three centuries later, a villa owner at Hinton St Mary, in Dorset, laid a floor mosaic with a man’s head in the centre, framed by the Greek letters chi and rho, the monogram of Christ. Found in 1963 and now in the British Museum, it is often called one of the earliest images of Christ in Britain, although some scholars think it may show an emperor. Either way, it is a provincial floor making a statement that the capital had not yet made in mosaic.
The Danube: Trajan’s victory in another style
The clearest test of the “poor copy” idea is a comparison. In Rome, Trajan celebrated his conquest of Dacia with Trajan’s Column, carved by the best workshops of the capital. At Adamclisi, in today’s Romania, a victory monument known as the Tropaeum Traiani was built in 109 CE, with 54 relief panels, or metopes, of the same wars. Their figures are squat, flat and frontal, their armour shown in bold outline.
Judged against the column, the Adamclisi reliefs look crude. Judged on their own terms, they are clear, forceful and easy to read from a distance, made by soldiers or local carvers for soldiers and provincials. The difference lies in purpose as much as in skill, and that is the answer to the title in miniature.
So: imitation or an art of its own?
Both words miss part of the story. Provincial art imitated Rome when that was the point (a governor’s statue, a temple for the emperor). Where it mattered more to speak to local people, to bury the dead in the old way or to honour the old gods, it went its own way. The result is the real art of the Roman world as most of its inhabitants knew it, more varied and often more personal than the official art of the capital. The Roman beginnings of that art are in the guide to the art of the Republic.
Where to see it
The British Museum in London has Fayum portraits, Palmyrene busts and the Hinton St Mary mosaic. The Metropolitan Museum in New York has the Temple of Dendur and Palmyrene and Egyptian portraits. On site, Nîmes, Bath and Adamclisi show provincial art where it was made, and the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen has one of the largest collections of Palmyrene portraits outside Syria.
Sources
- UCL Petrie Museum, “Hawara mummy portraits”; Royal Ontario Museum, “A Romano-Egyptian Fayum mummy portrait”.
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Temple of Dendur” (68.154) and “The Temple of Dendur: A Gift to The Met”.
- R. Bianchi Bandinelli, Rome: The Late Empire. Roman Art AD 200-400 (London, 1971).
- Britannia, “The Hinton St Mary Mosaic Pavement: Christ or Emperor?”.
- The British Museum, collection record for the Hinton St Mary Mosaic.
- J. Toynbee, Art in Roman Britain (London, 1962).
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