The pervasiveness of re-carving in the Roman world ensured its place as one of the essential skills in the stone-carver's repertoire. To date, studies on re-carving have tended to focus on the re-working of portraits into new likenesses, particularly imperial male portraits, as a result of what has become known by the modern name of damnatio memoriae. However, the frequent instances of architectural elements re-worked into portraits, statues and sarcophagi, such as the late Flavian portrait of a frowning man carved from an anta-capital, now at Princeton University Art Museum (inv. no. Y1953-25), underscore that re-carving was not confined to official recycling of condemned emperor portraits. Although portrait heads provide some of the most compelling evidence for re-carving, Romans reused sculpted material for a variety of purposes, and new objects could cross entire boundaries of sculptural categories. Therefore, in order to assess sculptural production, especially in private contexts, a wider consideration must be given to such pieces.
My research as the Henry Moore Foundation–BSR Fellow in Sculpture involved the examination and documentation of re-carved stone sculptures (portraits, statues, sarcophagi, reliefs, sculpted architectural blocks) that had been transformed into new objects through the practice of re-carving. The corpus investigated was drawn from Rome and Italy during the first five centuries ad. It explored the forms and varieties of sculptural re-carving, while considering aspects such as the sources of stone for re-carving projects, and the sculpting techniques employed in recycling and adapting existing works to new objects. Finally, it aimed to present new information about the supply and the organization of sculptural production in Roman Italy.
The three months allowed me to visit museums both in Rome and throughout Italy. In Rome, I was able to visit the sculptural collections of the Museo Nazionale Romano, including the Terme di Diocleziano. In addition, through the kind assistance of Umberto Utro, Claudia Valeri and Alessandro Vella, I also had the opportunity to visit the Gregoriano Profano and Pio Cristiano collections at the Musei Vaticani. Here I was able to identify a number of examples of re-carving and to examine the blocks from the Tomb of the Haterii, several of which were re-carved from earlier blocks. Outside Rome, I visited a number of collections, including the Museo Lapidario Estense in Modena, Museo Archeologico di Verona and the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Aquileia. The opportunity for first-hand examination allowed the recording and photographing of more than 40 new examples, bringing my empire-wide catalogue to c. 160 examples. One of the most important elements of my stay in Rome was working with Peter Rockwell, an American sculptor based in Rome, who is well-versed in ancient sculptural practices. This gave me the chance to re-carve a previously sculpted block into a new architectural element, which greatly enhanced my understanding of re-carving techniques.
The preliminary results of my research suggest some important conclusions about sculptural re-carving and the supply of marble for private commissions. First and foremost, stone ordered directly from quarries was one of many options for customers commissioning sculptural projects. Previously sculpted objects, alongside stone from cancelled commissions and demolition projects, architectural elements damaged during transit and unfinished pieces, which were unusable for their original purpose, could have acted as alternative sources for stone. It seems probable that stonemasons’ yards contained older material from a variety of contexts awaiting re-carving, because stone for sculpture would have been dependent on whatever workshops could obtain.
It is also notable that re-carved objects seem to have been commissioned predominantly by private individuals. This is important for a number of reasons. Firstly, despite laws restricting the movement of public material into private hands, the use of large-scale entablature blocks as sarcophagi demonstrates that such transferences did occur, perhaps as some workshops engaged in both private and public commissions, so with access to such material. Furthermore, the increased occurrences of this practice from the fourth and fifth centuries ad onwards suggest that it may have been easier for private individuals to procure previously sculpted blocks. This must be due to a much great availability of such material in this period and the growing acceptance of this practice of recycling, even in prominent public locations and imperial monuments. Finally, the high number of funerary portraits re-carved from previously sculpted objects is particularly interesting. This may suggest that older material was deployed in cases when time was short and clients needed pieces rapidly; however, the importance of economics in the decision to re-use second-hand material should not be underestimated. We should not forget that re-carved stone served the needs of individual clients while offering a means of financial saving, and, moreover, may have made carved stone available to a wider socio-economic class of individuals.
