New York University Excavations at Aphrodisias: Publication of Roman Sculpture from the site

PUBLISHED 2006: Please view the publication's webpage here: Roman Portrait Statuary from Aphrodisias. Aphrodisias II

Bert Smith has worked at Aphrodisias since 1985 and been director of the New York University Excavations there since 1991. Smith comes from Edinburgh in Scotland and studied Classics and Classical Archaeology at Oxford. He taught Hellenistic and Roman art at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University (1986-1995), and since 1995 he has been Lincoln Professor of Classical Archaeology and Art at Oxford University.

Smith's main research interests are in the historical interpretation of ancient visual representation and its relationship with contemporary social and political culture. In connection with his work at Aphrodisias he has a particular interest in the monumental culture of the Greek cities of the Eastern Roman Empire. With the historian Bryan Ward-Perkins, he completed a UK Art and Humanities Research Council database and book project titled The Last Statues of Antiquity (2009-12) that investigates the distinctive character of statue use in late antiquity from AD 284 to 650. He has been engaged in the study and publication of the new marble finds from Aphrodisias since 1985.

Aphrodisias is an unusally well preserved Greek city of the Roman period in inland Caria (S.W. Turkey, 37.70833° N, 28.72361° E) and has a remarkable body of surviving carved marbles with excavated contexts - statues, monuments, reliefs. The White-Levy project concerned the publication of two bodies of material of the Roman period: (1) the marble portrait statues, and (2) the marble reliefs from an imperial cult complex or Sebasteion.

Roman Portrait statuary. A large proportion of the statues produced at Aphrodisias were marble portrait honours awarded to men and women of the local elite. Their number and variety are striking. The first published volume arising from the White-Levy grant is a study of the character and use of portrait statues as public honors in an ancient city, as well as a primary publication of all the portrait statuary from the site, from the first century BC to the third century AD. Emphasis is placed on context and local meaning - on the setting and significance of statue monuments in local society under the Roman Empire. The material presented in this volume provides a near-complete repertoire from a single city of the changing self-representation of the kind of men and women that ran the Eastern Roman empire.

R.R.R. Smith, S. Dillon, C.H. Hallett, J.L. Lenaghan, and J.V. van Voorhis, Roman Portrait Statuary from Aphrodisias: Aphrodisias II (Philipp von Zabern, Mainz, 2006), 335 pp., 27 figs. and plans, 163 pls.
 

Reliefs from the Sebasteion. The Sebasteion at Aphrodisias was a grandiose temple complex dedicated to Aphrodite and the Julio-Claudian emperors. Its paved processional avenue (90 x 14 m) was flanked by two portico-like buildings, each three-storeyed and decorated with a long series of marble reliefs. More than seventy of the 200 life-size reliefs that the complex required were recovered in the excavation. They feature Roman emperors, Greek mythological heroes, and a series of personified ethnēor 'nations' of Augustus' world empire, from the Ethiopians of eastern Africa to the Callaeci of western Spain. The second published volume arising from the White-Levy grant publishes all of these reliefs and presents a detailed reconstruction of their architectural context and historical significance. They constitute a remarkable visualization of the Roman emperors as seen from the Greek East. The reliefs juxtapose Roman imperial themes with the exploits of Greek heroes of the past, and the emperors themselves are re-cast as warrior-heroes and Olympian saviours.

R.R.R. Smith, The marble reliefs from the Julio-Claudian Sebasteion at Aphrodisias: Aphrodisias VI (Philipp von Zabern, Darmstadt, 2013), 347 pp., 275 figs. and plans, 176 pls.
 

For the website of the Aphrodisias project, please see http://aphrodisias.classics.ox.ac.uk/