Periodic Reporting for period 2 - RESP (The Roman Emperor Seen From the Provinces. Imaging Roman Power in the Cities of the Empire from Augustus to the Tetrarchs (31 BC-AD 297))
Période du rapport: 2023-03-01 au 2024-08-31
The overall objectives of the project are: to produce the first narrative of the representation of Roman emperors on visual media in the provinces; to shed light on the methods of manufacture and distribution that underpinned Roman imperial image-making; to reassess the forms and influences of provincial cultural and artistic diversity, and their relation to the wider culture of the Roman Empire; to develop and implement a new research methodology in the field of digital humanities for the study of ancient portraiture.
The project’s website has been published and the database has been developed to host the data collated by the researchers to generate catalogues and all the materials to be used in the project's publications. The database is divided in two sections to cover all the evidence of imperial representation in full-figure and on provincial portraits in the provinces. The dataset collated in the first 36 months of research includes around 4.000 entries with thousands of images, ranging from the Julio-Claudians (31 BC - AD 68) to 2nd and 3rd century emperors and empresses.
An entire strand of research focusses on using three-dimensional data to try to reconstruct the genesis of provincial portraits by recreating the process by which a sculptor would have modelled a portrait on a bi-dimensional reference. The researchers in the Department of Computer Sciences at the University of Verona have designed an interface capable of automatically reconstructing a virtual 3D model of an imperial portrait in the round from the bi-dimensional profile portrait of a coin. The aim of this process is to study the relationship between portraits of the same emperor on different visual media and to understand how they might have originated from a shared model, particularly in the provinces, where the Roman prototypes that inspired provincial copies may have been altered by local artists and adapted to local needs.
Many outputs have already been produced on the work done so far. All the researchers have contributed to promoting the project and disseminating its preliminary results at international conferences in Rome, Leiden, Vienna, Princeton, including major events such as the 16th International Numismatic Conference in Warsaw (September 2022) and at the American Institute of Archaeology Annual Meeting in Chicago (January 2024). Six articles have been published in major international journals, another three have been already accepted for publication and will come out later in 2024, at least another three are in preparation to be submitted by the end of the year. Furthermore, the RESP has secured a publication agreement with Brill (Leiden-Boston) to produce no fewer than four monographs written by the team members and one edited volume gathering papers by the RESP researchers, the members of the advisory board and a number of leading scholars in the research fields investigated by the project (the genesis, reproduction, dissemination and post-classical reception of the imperial image in Rome and in the provinces). The volume is based on the papers delivered at the RESP international conference organised by the PI and his team, which was held at the University of Verona on 6-8 September 2023.
For each member of the imperial family examined in the research the project has produced the first ever typological study of the portraits adopted on the coins of the provincial cities. Moreover, in some cases, both in the Julio-Claudian period (31 BC-AD68) and in the 2nd century AD, there are compelling examples of coin portraits linked to sculptural images of the same emperor/empress, which either refer to each other or reflect shared models. Examples like these suggest that it in some cases the local workshops of coin engravers and marble carvers may have relied on the same model, a local copy of a metropolitan prototype which can, however, be regarded as an original product of provincial art.
The research has also progressed beyond the state of the art in exploiting 3D technology to investigate the image-making process in the Roman empire. Using 3D scans of sculptures as well as 3D scans of coins which show for the most part only profiles, the project is exploring different strategies to try to recreate the original models and the processes of dissemination. For this purpose, a novel methodological approach was designed in the first part of the project, which is using a digital morphable model of a human face to generate a portrait in the round from the 3D data acquired from the profile of a coin portrait. This is a generative model for face shape and appearance which can be trained by the computer to automatically fit to the facial features from a certain design. The RESP researchers have created an interface capable of detecting the most distinctive facial features of an emperor’s profile portrait on a coin and to generate a model in the round from them through the morphable model. Initial tests were done on portraits of emperor Hadrian (AD 117-138) and on the emperor Carausius (AD 286-293), whose portraits have survived exclusively on coinage, to try to reconstruct what his image on a sculpted portrait in the round would have looked like.