The investigation of late antique statuary lies at the intersection of various scholarly disciplines studying the ancient world. Late-antique statues are an example of a slowly dying genre, i.e. sculpture in the round, to which particular importance is attached, perhaps precisely because fewer and fewer such statues were being made. Statues set up in public are an important index of the continuity of civic practices in Late Antiquity; statues in the private sphere demonstrate the longevity of classical mythological themes during the transition to the Middle Ages. The intellectual quality of inscriptions on statue bases confirms the general picture of an elite that rejoiced in education, while the mutilation and destruction of portraits simultaneously attest to a fear of statues.
These are only a few aspects of the significance and differing understandings of statuary in Late Antiquity that are discussed by archaeologists, historians, and art historians in this volume. In the process, questions not just of the chronology of statues and the formation of statue-collections, but also of contextualization in both the private and the public spheres are addressed. Particular attention is paid to the reasons for the end of the production of statues, and to the question of which forms of representation took their place.
With contributions by Johanna Auinger ∙ Sarah Bassett ∙ Franz Alto Bauer ∙ Marianne Bergmann ∙ Barbara E. Borg ∙ Robert Coates-Stephens ∙ Niels Hannestad ∙ Susanne Muth ∙ Elisabeth Rathmayr ∙ R. R. R. Smith ∙ Peter Stewart ∙ Lea Stirling ∙ Christian Witschel