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How a famous Greek bronze ended up in Rome

The "Apoxyomenos," a famous Greek sculpture, was copied by Romans who admired Greek culture. These copies were displayed in public places like the Baths of Agrippa. The Romans' love for Greek art led to debates about public versus private ownership of such treasures. Today, museums grapple with similar issues about the origin and ownership of artifacts.
 
A conversation between Dr. Steven Zucker and Dr. Beth Harris standing in front of Lysippos, Apoxyomenos, Roman marble copy after Greek bronze original dating to c. 300 B.C.E. (Vatican Museums, Rome, Italy), and ARCHES video.
Created by Steven Zucker and Beth Harris.

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  • primosaur tree style avatar for user david.montalbo.26
    if the scraper was a roman copy of a greek bronze who does it belong to?
    (3 votes)
    Default Khan Academy avatar avatar for user
    • aqualine tree style avatar for user David Alexander
      Let's start at the very beginning (a very good place to start). Greeks worked in Bronze, a metal that rusts. Bronze is also recyclable, so when government and military leaders who didn't appreciate art, but needed metal for weapons, needed it, bronze statues got melted down to make other weapons.
      Romans who had seen the bronze statues admired them as art, and were wise enough to make their own out of carved marble which, apart from being great for statues, isn't a weapons-grade material.

      Many marble statues in Rome are "greek style", but were never in Greece.

      It's kind of like how the Apple Corporation designs its products in California, sources parts in Taiwan, Korea and Vietnam, and has the phones assembled in China. The resulting product is not really from any single place.
      (4 votes)
  • blobby green style avatar for user StoneyMarkham
    they said 'booty' in the video what plays above at least on the date and time in space time i viewed it last
    (2 votes)
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  • starky ultimate style avatar for user DragonFire
    So, uh... they know that 5 year old girls (and boys for that matter) have access to these videos, right? they could at least blur out those statues' d*cks, couldn't they?
    (1 vote)
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  • starky seedling style avatar for user Tabitha  Briones
    Greece is a place of art and has fragments the hole country is art so how can you say that its not unique ? the colture is so amazing and its culture
    (1 vote)
    Default Khan Academy avatar avatar for user
    • aqualine tree style avatar for user David Alexander
      "Unique" comes from the same word root as "unit", meaning "one-of-a-kind". All that a scholar need do is find another example of the same kind of thing to demonstrate that something is not "unique". Since Cyprus is not Greek, anything found in Cyprus that is of the same kind as that found in Greece, demonstrates that Greece is not unique.
      (2 votes)

Video transcript

(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)