Modern scholarly attempts to understand the movement of ancient artworks frequently consider trade, but seldom the ancient penchant for transporting finished works for other reasons. This session addresses the display of exotica, the reuse of booty and its repatriation, the production of copies and representations of original artworks for new and distant contexts, the local impact made by imported monuments, and what such processes reveal about cultural interactions around the ancient Mediterranean world.
The tent erected by Ptolemy II Philadelphos was the precursor of modern temporary art exhibitions, functioning as a kind of cabinet of wonders with artifacts imported from Phoenicia, Egypt, Persia, and Greece. From the time of Mummius barely one hundred years later, Romans feverishly transferred art, revising its cultural context and reinventing monuments for new Roman uses. As for copying famous works, in a world with few means of checking accuracy, the gist was what people remembered, so a copy might retain only the idea of the original. Hadrian represented the many regions of the world he visited and the exotic places of mythology by conceiving of his villa at Tivoli as a walkable diagram of foreign lands, with décor mimicking far-flung cultures, both known and imagined.
- A.A. Donohue (Bryn Mawr College)
Representation and the Villa Adriana
- Elena Calandra (Direzione Regionale per i Beni Culturali e Paesaggistici della Liguria)
Monumentum non perenne: la tenda di Tolomeo II Filadelfo ad Alessandria
- Jocelyn Penny Small (Rutgers University)
Copies and Visual Memory: The Alexander Mosaic
- Kenneth Lapatin (The J. Paul Getty Museum)
Repatriation in Antiquity
- Margaret M. Miles (University of California, Irvine)
Ornaments for Italy: Rededicating Statues in Republican Rome