(melodic jazz music)
- [Steven] We're in the Vatican Museums
looking at one of the most famous works
in the entire Western tradition.
This is a sculpture known as the "Apoxyomenos,"
the "Scraper."
- [Beth] By a very famous ancient Greek sculptor
named Lysippos, we're actually looking
at an ancient Roman copy.
- [Steven] So what we're gonna try to answer
in this video is how a major sculpture
by a famous ancient Greek ended up as a Roman copy
in the Vatican in the city of Rome in the third,
the second and even the first centuries, BCE.
The Romans not only conquered Greece,
but also its many territories and colonies
and triumphant Roman generals
brought back enormous numbers of Greek sculptures
and to a lesser extent, ancient Greek paintings
and even architectural fragments.
- [Beth] Now the Romans were not unique
in making off with booty during war,
there was an age old precedent for that,
but when the Romans confronted Greek art
and brought it back to Rome,
that was a transformational experience.
In fact, Horace wrote
that although the Romans had conquered Greece,
Greece through its culture conquered Rome,
- [Steven] It symbolized a great intellectual tradition,
that Rome saw itself as becoming the inheritor of.
- [Beth] It signified a kind of luxury,
a life of educated cultural refinement,
that seemed very different
than the current life of ancient Romans.
- [Steven] So let's just walk through how this would work.
Rome would conquer an area, perhaps a Greek city state,
or perhaps simply an area that had been allied with Greece
and soon after objects that were deemed worthy of import
would be packed onto ships and brought back to Rome,
where they would often be paraded through the city
during a triumph.
- [Beth] A triumph was essentially an opportunity
for a victorious general to exhibit the booty
that they had brought back
and to celebrate their military victory
and it would have given the agent Romans,
who lived here in Rome
and hadn't traveled to these distant places,
a sense of the wealth and power of these places,
that were being conquered by the great Roman army.
- [Steven] And then after the triumph,
an enormous number of objects would be put on public display
in various parts of the city,
but most famously in the Temple of Peace,
just beside the Roman Forum.
Now ancient Rome didn't have museums,
but in a way places like the Temple of Peace
become a kind of proto-museum.
So many of these Greek objects had been used originally
in religious or civic environments,
but the Romans ripped them out of their original context
and made them aesthetic objects,
made them objects of luxury.
- [Beth] When objects are looted,
whether we're talking about the ancient world
or the modern world, they often lose that original meaning.
- [Steven] And the "Apoxyomenos" is a perfect case in point,
we don't have its original location,
we don't know from literature or from any evidence,
where this originally would have been placed,
the Romans took it and now it's here.
- [Beth] But let's be careful,
when we say the Romans took it,
the Romans took the bronze original
and because of this developing love of Greek art,
ultimately many copies were made of it,
one of the most beautiful is here in the Vatican Museums.
So the "Apoxyomenos" is brought to the city of Rome
as war booty and it's set up by Agrippa
in front of the baths that he built
for the public here in Rome.
- [Steven] And it was in the Baths of Agrippa,
that the Roman public really fell in love
with this sculpture.
The baths were essentially a public place
and a place where the average Roman
could see ancient Greek sculpture.
- [Beth] So what Agrippa did was considered to be generous,
he was giving this to the people
the way that a private collector today
might donate a work to a museum,
so it could be shared with the public.
- [Steven] So you can imagine how upset that public was,
when the emperor Tiberius took the sculpture
from the Baths of Agrippa and brought it to his own house,
put it in his own bed chambers.
- [Beth] Pliny says Lysippos was most prolific in his works
and made more statues than any other artist.
Among these is the man using the body scraper,
which Marcus Agrippa had erected in front of his warm baths
and which wonderfully pleased the emperor Tiberius.
This emperor could not resist the temptation
and had this statue removed to his bed chamber,
having substituted another for it at the baths.
The people however were so resolutely opposed to this,
that at the theater, they clamorously demanded
the "Apoxyomenos" to be replaced
and the emperor not withstanding his attachment to it
was obliged to restore it.
- [Steven] So the court of public opinion was so loud,
that the emperor actually gave it back to the people,
it speaks to the power of images,
in a way the sculpture became a way
of differentiating public good from private greed.
- [Beth] And this was part of a long standing conversation
in Rome among those like Cato and Cicero,
who believed that this booty that was taken
should be available to the public
versus those who took the booty and kept it for themselves
to decorate their private villas.
- [Steven] And all of these issues remain important today,
our museums are filled with objects,
that come from different places
and many of those objects were looted.
Museums are looking at their collections now
and wondering whether some of them should be repatriated,
that is returned to their country of origin
and in any case how their meaning has been transformed
by being taken out of their original context
and put into a museum,
where their meaning is completely transformed.
- [Beth] The Romans were not without sympathy
for the conquered peoples, in fact,
Livy wrote very sympathetically about the King of Syracuse.
If this King were to rise from the realms below,
with what words could we show him either Syracuse or Rome,
when after he looked back
on his half-destroyed and despoiled fatherland,
he would see as he entered Rome
in the vestibule of the city, almost in the gates,
the spoils of his own fatherland.
- [Steven] So when we look at the "Apoxyomenos"
now on display in the Vatican in the 21st century,
we generally look at it as an exemplar of ancient Greek art
and too often, we forget the complex story
of how this sculpture was looted, how it was loved,
how it was adopted by the Roman people,
how it was copied and ultimately ended up here.
(melodic jazz music)