Roman Sculpture

Roman Sculpture includes portraits, statues and reliefs made across the Roman world for public buildings, temples, homes and tombs. Portraits communicated identity through facial features, dress and setting, ranging from closely observed likenesses to idealized images of rulers. Narrative reliefs represented ceremonies, campaigns and acts of government on monuments, while funerary sculpture preserved family memory. Roman patrons also valued Greek art, commissioning copies and adaptations alongside new works. Marble and bronze supported different approaches to scale and surface. The surviving sculptures are therefore evidence both of Roman social life and of the ways older artistic traditions were collected, reinterpreted and transmitted.