Abstracts

In 1993, 2012, and 2014, well-preserved partial remains of a large bronze-workshop were uncovered at the Sanctuary of Zeus in Jerash. Thanks to the close cooperation between Jordanian, German, and French specialists, more than three thousand mold fragments have been restored and the other relevant installations of the workshop, dated to the second half of the second century AD, preserved. All the pieces will be accessible, as a unique cultural heritage monument of Jordan, through an exhibit in the Jordan National Museum.

The bronze-workshop was located on the lower terrace of the Zeus sanctuary. At the moment, its remains include four large mold pits, with traces of large copper-alloy cast objects at the bottom (two circular, two rectangular in plan). Some three thousand pieces of the smashed mold mantle (consisting of baked earth), along with numerous fragments of the furnaces and other installations, had been dumped into these pits when the casting process was finished. The negative impression on the interiors of the mold fragments led to the conclusion that large-sized draped statuary, as well as other objects (cultic instruments?), was fabricated in this workshop by the lost-wax procedure.

The main goal of this paper is to present the discovery and underwater survey of the ancient Apoxyomenos and to explore the mystery of how the statue ended up at the bottom of the sea.

A Belgian diver, R. Wouters, discovered the bronze statue of the Apoxyomenos by chance while diving in the waters off the island of Mali Lošinj in the Republic of Croatia. The statue was found at a depth of 46 meters on a curved seabed, stuck between two rocks. After very exacting preparations, which incorporated the advice of many experts, the process of excavation began. The statue was brought to the surface with the cooperation of underwater archaeologists and members of the special police. Afterward, the Apoxyomenos was delivered to conservators. A month of research was then conducted at the underwater site where the statue was found.

The research was international in character, with English, Belgian, and Croatian divers. They were driven by the same goal: to find other discoveries and possibly the underwater shipwreck. Unfortunately, despite detailed investigation with underwater metal detectors and waterpipes, the shipwreck has not been found. Does this mean that we will never find out how the Apoxyomenos ended up on the seabed? To answer this question, we will have to look more deeply into historical, geographic, climatic, and nautical contexts.

Although it was discovered many years ago near Amelia (Italy), a handsome, over-life-size bronze cuirassed statue with an inserted portrait head of Germanicus has garnered relatively little attention. In pose and typology, this work resembles the statue of Augustus from Prima Porta, but the imagery of the muscled cuirass—depicting the death of the Trojan Troilos at the hands of Achilles—is quite different.

Because of its seemingly odd subject matter for a Roman sculpture, the principal interpretation of this statue, in a 2008 monograph by G. Rocco, is that it originally represented King Mithridates VI, who saw himself as a new Achilles in his war against Rome. The depiction of the defeat of Troilos would have served as a reference to Mithridates’s victory over Rome, which traced its origins back to Troy. In the end, Mithridates was himself defeated by Sulla, who, according to Rocco, then brought the statue back to Rome, where its head was first replaced with a portrait of Sulla and eventually with one of Germanicus.

I argue, however, that the portrait of Germanicus either was integral to the original composition or was substituted for the head of his son Caligula after Caligula’s assassination and damnation. My interpretation is based on the decorative motifs of the armor, which go back to Hellenistic models but are also found in Roman art, as well as technical considerations and a very different interpretation of the meaning of the defeat of Troilos.

(The full article based on this abstract has appeared in AJA 121.3 [2017].)

The two reconstructions of Polykleitos’s lost Spear-Bearer in bronze can tell us many stories. They were both made in Munich from three Roman copies between 1910 and 1921. This paper addresses the bronzes’ place in history: in ancient art, in Stettin and Munich, and in Germany after the First and Second World Wars.

This project studies the influence of ancient bronzes on Cuban large-scale sculptures that are still on display in Havana today. It focuses on the process of creation and construction of three specific works, located inside the capitol of the Republic of Cuba in the twentieth century.

These pieces are The Republic, The Progress of Human Activity, and The Virtue of the People. They were commissioned from the Italian sculptor Angelo Zanelli (1879–1942), who created them and was in charge of placing them inside the capitol. This poster explains the impact they had on the Cuban architectural style of the period.