Georgetown College. Georgetown University.

By Gabrielle Matthews

Professor Catherine Keesling, chair of the Department of Classics at Georgetown, is inspired by statues.

Washington, DC is a particularly interesting place to view statues—Keesling’s particular area of interest. The nation’s capital is full of monuments: from the Lincoln Memorial to the many traffic circles, almost all of these monuments contain honorific portraits. Everywhere you go in Washington you see them—not just at the monuments and the traffic circles, but even on the Georgetown campus, and “other strategic areas, like embassies,” she noted. 

But it was looking out the window of her office in Healy Hall at the portrait statue of John Carroll that inspired Keesling to begin her current research and her quest to understand the nature of portrait statuary in ancient Greece, and the Roman tradition that followed.  

In her 13th year at Georgetown, aside from teaching classes on the history of ancient Greece, Archaeology, and ancient Greek language, Keesling is an expert in Greek sculpture and the inscriptions that accompanied ancient Greek statues. She was already in the process of studying statues dedicated in sanctuaries for what they could tell her about ancient Greek culture, when she hit upon her current research topic. Greeks started dedicating statues of gods in their sanctuaries, which turned, over a 100-year period between about 450 and 350 B.C.E., into statues of private citizens. For example, if your uncle was sick, and miraculously recovered, at one time a statue of Apollo would have been dedicated in a sanctuary of Apollo in thanks for the uncle’s health. Over a hundred year period this changed—now you would dedicate a statue of your uncle, who received the beneficent care of the gods. 

These Greek statues of citizens were primarily cast in bronze with stone bases. The metal, being valuable for many purposes, was broken down and melted over the centuries and lost. But the bases of the statues, thousands of which remain, are what most interest Keesling. From the inscriptions on the bases they tell her that in the fourth century B.C.E., these statues were mostly of ordinary people, and sometimes they were even grouped by family. Placing portraits of average people (not just the incredibly wealthy or famous) in sanctuaries was a common practice. 

This textual evidence, the inscriptions on the bases, is Keesling’s main source of primary data. She has found the perfect cross-section for her studies: her archaeological skills, her knowledge of ancient Greek language, and her work with epigraphy (the study of inscriptions). She knows she is able to cast herself in a special role for this kind of study. 

“If I can make myself a person who works on this,” she said, thinking back on the beginning of this study, “I will have a lot of primary evidence. Acropolis, Delphi—the thousands of remaining bases show what Greeks were doing.” 

What the Greeks were doing with their statuary informs the Roman tradition—and how modern scholarship understands the shifting culture of the ancient Mediterranean. 

Everyone who visits the ancient collections in museums sees Roman marble copies of Greek statues and busts. It is in some part due to these copies that centuries of scholars have been able to study and appreciate Greek statuary. However, Keesling notes, the ancient Greek portrait tradition has also been misunderstood because of these Roman copies. 

Around 200 B.C.E., Romans took control of Greece. They had great respect for Greek culture and admiration for Greek artistic expertise, and because of this they liked to collect portraits of famous Greeks for their villas. For instance, Keesling noted, if you were a learned Roman, you might have wanted copies of portraits of Greek philosophers in your home. “So we’re going to have about a thousand of Plato,” she said with a laugh.  

With this volume of copies of famous Greeks, thanks to the Romans, modern scholarship took a wrong turn, notes Keesling. “This perversity of scholarship goes back to the 18th century C.E., when western European scholars took for granted that Greek portraiture functioned the same way as Roman,” she said. “The idea of the portrait gallery is actually a relatively late one.”

To complicate things further, when the Roman Empire began to take over Greece, oftentimes in a show of flattery the name of the subject of the original—Greek—subject would be scratched out, and the name of a Roman leader would be inscribed.

“Cicero was a particular detractor of this practice, “ said Keesling. “He didn’t like false honors.”

The erasure of the original subject and the inscription of a new, Roman name is something Keesling is still investigating. 

“I think this is much more prominent than people realize, and it sheds a whole new light on Greek sculpture,” Keesling explained. “I’d go to museums and see this type of erasure and know that something is going on.” 

Keesling has hit on a new idea for her field—looking at the visual arts, by way of reading the statue bases as text. And by understanding the differences between Greek and Roman statuary portraiture, she is helping to differentiate the ancient practices and the nature of this art.

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