Recall that this transformation of domestic space took place in the wake of contact with and conquest of the Hellenistic Greeks.  When it came to artistic objects in general, contact with the Greeks brought other changes and came into conflict with other native Roman traditions.  In the days of the Roman monarchy and the early Republic, visual and material arts were not something the Romans themselves created.  Works of art were something other peoples did, specifically people that the Romans had conquered militarily and politically.  From very early on, the Romans attached a considerable stigma to visual and material arts.  Numa Pompilius, the second king of Rome, outright banned sculpture on religious grounds.  Sculpting in particular struck the Romans as menial, disgraceful work.  Interestingly, a partial exception to this revulsion toward the arts was painting.  The Romans for some reason recognized the skill needed for painting.  The noble Roman family of the Fabii illustrates several different attitudes toward the arts.  In the fourth century BC, a certain Gaius Fabius himself painted murals for the inside of the Temple of Good Health.  This was rather controversial work for him to do, because it was uncool for an upper class Roman to be an artist.  (The Fabii did seem to have a radical streak: a later descendent was the first Roman to seriously pursue another suspect career, that of writing history.)  Nevertheless, despite the shame he risked incurring to the family name, Fabius did the painting, and did a fine job.  Good enough that even a later Greek critic reviewed it favorably.  So, as it turned out, he brought a good reputation to his family, who actually took on the cognomen Pictor because of the painting.  So this Fabius became known to posterity as Fabius Pictor, "Fabius the Painter."  But the Fabii were very much the exception to the rule when it came to participating in artistic creation.  The rule was that when the Romans wanted or needed a piece of art other than what they acquired through military conquest, they commissioned an foreign artist to produce it for them.

So what kind of art did the Romans commission, when they felt they just had to have something?  During this early period, Roman art was consistently functional and monumental.  That is, an object of art was never a decoration or simply a matter of aesthetics.  Rather it served a purpose, usually religious in origin or use, and acted to remind the Romans of some important person, deity, or legacy.  The dominant form of art in this pursuit was portrait sculpture and the dominant purpose of these sculptures was religious, such as the portraits of the family's ancestors.  The Romans commissioned sculptures of appropriate divinities for their homes and temples.  Remember, too, that Gaius Fabius' painting project was for a temple.

 The turning point for the Romans came during the Second Punic War when the Roman general Marcellus plundered the city of Syracuse on the island of Sicily in 211BC.  Syracuse had been a major artistic center on and off for centuries.  So, while the Romans had a tradition of taking trophies from the places they conquered, they had never done so on a scale like they could here, and Marcellus made the most of it.  He had thousands of works of art brought from Syracuse to Rome.  He brought so many that he was basically able to transform Rome into an attractive, cosmopolitan city in its own right.  It was part of the tradition of military conquest that a successful general like Marcellus make religious dedications to honor the gods for his triumph.  Accordingly, Marcellus dedicated temples at the Porta Capena.  And, of course, he decorated them with some of his loot from Syracuse.  The historian Livy, and you read some of his history in the Citizen unit, tells us something interesting happened.  These temples were so striking, that many people, including foreigners, began visiting the temples not for any religious purpose but simply to come admire their beauty (25.40.1-3).  This, as you might imagine, upset some Romans who were already suspicious of art.

 We get some sense of the nervousness caused by the acquisitions from Syracuse in Livy's account of Fabius Maximus sacking the Italian town of Tarentum two years later.  During the Second Punic War, Tarentum had revolted from the Romans and Fabius Maximus was sent to bring them back in line.  And he did.  But Livy adds a point to his account.  He says that Fabius Maximus took some 30,000 captives along with thousands and thousands of pounds of gold and silver.  But at one point an accountant asks Fabius what he wants to do with a series of Tarentine statues --these were large statues of warrior gods-- and Livy says that because Fabius was of a higher character (maiore animo) than Marcellus, he ordered that these statues of "infuriated gods" (iratos deos) as he called them, be left to the people of Tarentum rather than be brought to Rome (27.16.7).  The Greek essayist Plutarch later wrote a biography of Marcellus and described the significance of his siege of Syracuse versus Fabius Maximus' treatment of Tarentum:

 "When Marcellus returned to Rome, he brought with him many of the most beautiful religious monuments in Syracuse, so that they would both make a visual impression of his triumph and be an ornament for the city.  Prior to this, Rome neither had nor even knew of these exquisite and refined things, and there was no passion in the city for anything charming or elegant.  Instead, it was full of barbaric weapons and bloody spoils.  Although it was decorated with memorials and trophies of triumphs, there was not a single sight that was either pleasant or even less than frightening for spectators seeking civilized refinement.  ...Consequently, Marcellus gained even greater respect among the people because he had decorated the city with sights which both provided pleasure and possessed a certain Greek charm and appeal, while Fabius Maximus was more respected among elder Romans.  Fabius did not carry such things off from Tarentum, or even disturb them when he conquered the city... Senior Roman citizens cursed Marcellus because he made the city an object of envy both among mortals and also among the gods, gods whom Marcellus had dared to lead like slaves in his triumphal parade.  In addition, the Roman people, who previously led lives filled with fighting and farmwork and knew nothing of softness and luxury, Marcellus now filled them up with a taste for leisure and pointless blather, pretending to make sophisticated small talk about art and artists, even to the point of wasting the better part of the day away.  But Marcellus himself did not feel this criticism at all.  He proclaimed proudly, even to the Greeks!, that he had educated the Romans, who previously were all but entirely ignorant, to respect and appreciate the beauty and wonder of Greek art." (Marcellus 21)

 The controversy did not die quickly.  Conservative Romans like the elder Cato dismissed the value of Greek imports.  Ironically, Cato was himself honored with a public portrait statue, to which he responded that he would rather be known for NOT having a statue made of him than for having one.  He felt that the Romans needed to worry about the quality of their souls more than the quality of their art.  It was a losing cause, however.  The Roman nobility in particular became fanatics for more and more elaborate specimens of Greek art.  This fever for accomplished works of art resulted in the refinement of the strikingly individual and realistic portraiture which is a hallmark of Classical Roman art.

 It also resulted in another hallmark of Roman art: Roman copies of Greek originals.  Much to the dismay of conservative Romans, the desire and market for works of art, specifically classical Greek art, kept growing as the Romans became wealthier and their territory expanded.  Just as now, possession and display of fine art designated a certain quality and distinction on its owner.  Typical of the drive to impress others, the market developed not so much for Greek styles of art as for particularly famous examples of Greek art.  Since there were only a handful of famous Greek originals, not many wealthy Roman aristocrats who wanted to could have one.  So they settled for the next best thing: a copy.  As with so many things the Romans did, once they started this industry of copying famous works of art, they refined and expanded the industry beyond any the world had ever seen before.

Let's take a look at this industry.  We are actually fairly lucky when it comes to studying Roman copies.  We have many surviving copies, although most are just fragments or damaged in some way.  We are also grateful for the copies.  Not only do we learn a great deal about the industry of Roman copies from them, but a lot about the Greek originals.  In fact, for a long time, we had to study Roman copies carefully in order to extrapolate information about Greek art because we did not have much Greek art to study otherwise.  It is only in recent decades that archaeology has advanced from the study of mostly Roman copies to studying Greek originals in their own right.  We can also compare originals and copies side by side, as here.

This is a statue known as the "Suppliant Barberini."  It represents a woman as a suppliant, that is, as begging or petitioning.  Fig. 33 is the original and fig. 35 is a later copy.  This pair of statues shows us several features characteristic of Roman copies.  First, we can make some observations about the quality of the reproduction.  Two components usually serve as guides for the quality of a Roman copy.  First, the head and hairstyle.  Second, the clothing and dress.  This time, the clothing tells us a lot.  The outfit and pose of each statue are similar, but details mark one as merely a copy.  The original has a rather elaborate series of folds and selvege (the edges where the line of the weave is folded over to prevent unraveling).  The copyist has streamlined the folds and the selvege in the clothing.  You can see this most clearly where the folds drop from her hip.  The fold becomes straighter and simpler on the copy.  And then there's pull above her left foot.  The copyist has pulled the garment up and tighter.  A couple of other differences may be of a different order.  Notice that the head is facing a different direction: upward in the original and downcast on the copy.  Then there is the right hand.  On the original, she holds an object.  On the copy, the hand is open and does not seem to be holding an offering.  The overall change is noticeable.  If you know the original and compare the copy directly to it, you would never confuse the two.  On the other hand, it is not often that Roman buyers would have had the opportunity to compare the original with the copy they were ordering.  And it is quite possible, even though some statues existed in vast numbers of copies all over the Roman world, that some buyers and owners of copies actually believed they had acquired an original.  In many cases, however, part of buying a copy was determining just how good a particular copy was.
 
 

These are examples of what is called a kore statue.  Kore is nothing more than Greek for a young woman.  Figs. 38-40 show the original, while figs. 41-46 show copies.  The original is one of a series of such statues which served as decorative support columns for a Erichtheion porch on top of the Athenian Acropolis, just across from the Parthenon.  Since the statue was originally part of a famous structure in its own right, it can look a little odd in isolation, but the idea once again is simply to have a famous Greek statue, and you can adapt it subtly to your home.  The head and the clothing are once again useful guides to the copies.  Kore statues of various types are extremely common in Greek sculpture and Roman copy but this one has a quirk in its outfit that tested the accuracy of copyists.  The original kore is wearing a kind of robe, called a peplos, and down her back she is also wearing a cloak, or mantle.  You can see on the front how the peplos is folded over.  The mantle on her back is also folded over at about the same height.  They are two separate garments, but the sculptors of the copies thought that the fold in back was a continuation of the fold in front rather than a separate fold of a separate garment.  In fig.42, you can see one copyist's attempt to make the fold continuous.  He adds some extra material and folds in back here, where they make no sense, in an attempt to run the folds all the way around.  Figs. 43-46 show copies of still lower quality, made for a villa belonging to the 2nd century AD emperor Hadrian.  In addition to the mistake with the folds, the faces are done in a different style, with drills in this case.  Moreover, although these were all designed as reproductions in a set, each statue has different errors in copying the faces.  The eyes are all different sizes and so forth.  So these are mediocre copies.  While some Romans may not have realized they were settling for a hack copy of a Greek original, some were decidedly conscious of the quality of what they obtained.  We know of instances where the same household had two copies of the same Greek original, one rather poor and one pretty good.  What may have happened in cases like this is that the head of the family inherited a poor copy and it was something of a family heirloom.  Then suppose the family business started doing really well.  The head of the family might purchase a more accomplished copy of the same statue to symbolize their success.  Displaying such a statue can tell visitors and clients: "I started off with family means like this poor statue, but in my generation, we increased in wealth, sophistication, and status so that we now have a better one."  This is a crucial step in the development of the way Romans appropriated Greek art.  It did not happen all at once nor did all Romans at any given time necessarily view art in this manner.  But the use of art to symbolize status became increasingly prevalent as time goes on and remains vitally important to Roman culture as long as the empire lasts.

This pair of statues poses a different set of questions.  This statue is called the fleeing Niobid.  She is one of Niobe's seven daughters, who in mythology are shot down by Apollo and Artemis for their mother's arrogance.  Figs. 53-54 show one statue while 55-57 shows different perspectives on another.  But the situation is not so simple as original and copy this time.  Heads do not help much here, since the one statue has lost its head.  But the clothing shows a lot.  The front is similar, although as on the Suppliant Barberini, the folds have been simplified somewhat.  But the design in back is totally different.  The original has the peplos flowing out in back as she runs.  The copy has her in a slightly different pose, as if she has stopped running and her clothes have fallen to drape down along her back.  When we take other stylistic features into consideration, it seems as if what we have is an original which is in fact a new version of a still older Greek original.  The copy is a copy not of this particular original, but the original of which this original is a modification.  So you can see how the issue of originals and copies can get complicated.  And this can explain why sometimes Roman buyers themselves would have to be experts to judge the quality of the art they acquired.

Changes like this and like those on the Suppliant Barberini can also have another motive.  The copy of this fleeing Niobid is part of a group of statues.  There were seven daughters and seven sons of Niobe, after all.  The modified original, on the other hand, was designed to stand alone.  All of the copies I've shown you belong to a set or are incorporated into a piece of architecture.  So, naturally enough, sometimes copies were modified to suit their new surroundings.  The Romans were not above incorporating a very famous individual statue into a totally different environment and changing the original as necessary to make it fit.  For this reason we have many copies of different sizes as well as reversed images.  Adjustments like the turn of the head and change of the hand that we saw on the Suppliant Barberini could also result from fitting the copy into a new set-up.  To an extent these are pragmatic adjustments but more significantly these are aesthetic adjustments and decisions.  These are decisions simply to make things look better, to make them look right.  Remember that this is just the sort of thing that old conservative Romans were suspicious of, that people like Cato said Romans should NOT be spending their time doing.