“All over the Empire, sculptors were busy churning out standardized effigies of Augustus, mostly in marble but some in bronze. … There was more in common between classical Roman art and the techniques of Andy Warhol than one might at first suppose. A huge empire had to be saturated with images of its deified emperor.”
– except from Chapter 2: Augustus of Robert Hughes’ Rome: A Cultural, Visual, and Personal History
Knowing now that the surviving depictions of Augustus, some 200 of them, aren’t unique and rare pieces of art but rather a few examples of many thousands of largely identical figures of the emperor, and that they existed for propaganda reasons (to spread his identity / divine image throughout the land) definitely shifts how I will view them. I am going to look at Roman era statuary now less as examples of Greek (because lots of the artists were Greek slaves) or Roman “art”, but rather as political advertising and I will be trying to puzzle out what all the symbolism means.
As an example, Hughes talks about the Augustus of Prima Porta and explains what some of it means (cuirass design showing his recovery of a captured standard, miniature Eros reminding that his family line descends from Venus, dolphin of his destroying Antony & Cleopatra’s fleets, etc.). It will be interesting to see other bits of art from that era and trying to see which, if any, bits I can puzzle out on my own before resorting to researching the details.