From Face to Face: Recarving of Roman Portraits and the Late-Antique Portrait Arts

Description

Recarved marble portraits of emperors and private citizens were common in the Roman empire, though recent scholarship has focused, perhaps overly so, on imperial portraits reused after the condemnation of the original subject’s memory, or damnatio memoriae. Prusac’s work notably diverges from this tendency to explore reuse in both imperial and private portraits through late antiquity, when recarving became a standard working practice among Roman sculptors. Prusac posits that by the third century CE, economic concerns had replaced memory sanctions as the primary motivation for reuse, and by the fourth century, recarved images were more common than new ones for both imperial and private portraits. No longer driven primarily by ideology, reuse emerged as a dominant practice in late antiquity due to practical concerns. Its ascendance had a direct impact on the appearance of portraits and Prusac argues that the techniques used to refashion a portrait produced characteristics typically associated with ‘late-antique style’ such as large eyes and uplifted gazes. Prusac’s work has significant repercussions for our understanding of both late-antique portraiture and the broader issue of Roman attitudes towards reuse in antiquity.