Roman Copies, Collecting, and Culture in the Bay of Naples and Beyond

Roman Copies, Collecting, and Culture in the Bay of Naples and Beyond presents ten chapters in celebration of the career, contributions, influence, and person of Eugene Dwyer, Professor of Art History Emeritus at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio.

The ten commissioned essays here are written by senior scholars in the fields of ancient Italic art history, architecture and archaeology, and focus on the visual and material culture of the Bay of Naples and Italy, from their points of creation in the late Republic and early Empire to their reception in the medieval, Early Modern, and Modern worlds. The essays are united in their engagement with topics of longstanding interest to their honorand: copies of famous marble statue types in antiquity (e.g., the Old Seneca in the Louvre, archaistic Athenas) and their later restorations and interpretation; the formation of collections of antiquities, from their original sites of display to their reconstitution in Early Modern venues (especially England); nineteenth and twentieth-century visual and poetic representations of Mount Vesuvius and of Giuseppe Fiorelli’s gypsum casts of Pompeian victims; and case studies of a wide array of both well-known and previously overlooked objects, whose imagery is subject to fresh interpretation and contextualized within its wider social and cultural settings.