 My name is Michael Court-Bogen. I have the great pleasure of being the supervisor of Daniel Healy, who's our next speaker and the last one in this morning's session. Daniel came to Princeton from UMass Amherst. He's thrived ever since. I'm going to keep this one short as well. But I do want to say he has in the last couple of years begun to speak and lecture rather widely on material related to his dissertation, which is entitled Retrospective Styles in Roman Artistic Culture. He's spoken at the AIA meetings last year. He's spoken at Boston University, at Columbia University, Oxford University, and a number of other places at conferences and at seminars. Today, he's going to speak on form as function in Roman Retrospective Statuary. Well, thank you, Michael, for that introduction, and thank you to everyone at the Barnes for organizing this great day of art history and for all of you for attending. In this badly faded painting cut from the wall of a dining room in Pompeii, we can still discern the elements of a rather loose Roman dinner party. In the upper register, a group of male and female diners recline together on couches. One of their party has had too much to drink and is slumped over the table very much in his cups. In the foreground center is a dry raiding female dancer, better seen in this drawing made after the painting in the 1920s. Musicians are seated at bottom left of the picture frame, and to the right are two figures who appear to be waiting table, one of them carrying a large tray. A closer look at this last figure reveals that his skin is metallic and shiny, that he is entirely nude, and that he stands atop a circular base. He is not a human figure, but rather a bronze statue, transformed into the likeness of a waiting servant by the addition of a functional tray. Rather than a whim of the artist who painted this scene, the tray bearing statue was in fact a popular domestic item in the Roman world, of which all these are examples. They come from all over the Roman Empire, including Germany, Spain, Morocco, the Black Sea, and a number of sites in Italy and off the Italian coast. In most cases, their trays have not survived, suggesting that they were made of perishable wood. What have survived are the bronze frames, atop which the trays rested. These were usually cast in the form of stylized acanthus stocks or grapevines, and may terminate it in a handle, like the one marked here by a blue arrow, which fitted into the statue's hand. The red arrows indicate the inserts that are present on the tops of some of the frames. Presumably these would have fitted into corresponding holes in the bottom of a wooden tray, securing it in place. Turning to the figures themselves, we observe that the boys are all prepubescent, lacking any indication of pubic hair. Their physiques, however, hardly correspond to such a young age. On the whole, they are too muscled and sinuous to convey a naturalistic representation of prepubescence. Naturalism is also diminished by their small scale and their statue bases, as we see in the painting. For Roman audiences, such statues of nude young boys would have appeared highly traditional, and definitely Greek. They reflected a history of Greek sculpture that was for the Romans already many centuries old, and which included well-known masterpieces from a limited canon of Greek artists. Today, I will focus on just three examples in order to demonstrate how the Romans transformed Greek statues into functional tray-bearers. My argument is that it was the figural language of Greek statuary that inspired this change, and in particular, a quality that I describe as attentiveness. By this, I mean the statue's appearance of attending to their observers through gestures and objects that they hold out in their hands, and which in turn solicit their observer's own attentions. This is an artistic strategy that has received a good deal of critical attention. Aloise Regal, Michael Freed, and Jonathan Query have all described a similar dynamic between the subjects and the audiences of European painting, and in the realm of antique statuary, Peter von Blankenhagen has discussed what he calls the supplementary viewer as an innovation of Hellenistic artists in particular. My own contribution is to demonstrate a distinctively Roman engagement with the quality of attentiveness, which was actually its profound transformation from statues designed to be looked at to statues intended for a very different purpose, to interact with their beholders as participants in the rituals of Roman social life. My first example is this statue discovered in a house in Pompeii in 1977. An excavation photo at right reveals that the statue was found with his tray attachment still in his hands, leaving no doubt as to his function. The Roman owner of the house was a wealthy collector of Greek artifacts, including a bronze hydria like the one on the left, which dates to the mid-5th century BC, and which was found in the same room as the tray bearer. It is the statue, however, that best demonstrates the owner's taste for the antique. Although he was very likely made in the first century BC, he has been styled to look as though he is much older. Placing him side by side with this marble statue from the late archaic period, we can observe the stylistic features that the Roman sculptors sought to emulate in the bronze. Both figures stand fully frontal, with their feet firmly planted on the ground, and their left leg slightly advanced. The faces of the two statues, however, exhibit important differences. Features that have been sensitively carved in the marble version, like the eyebrows and the soft area of flesh around the mouth, have been added to the bronze with inlay, creating a graphic, more abstracted visage, which actually belongs to an earlier period of Greek art. Such a combination of stylistic elements from different periods of Greek art is in fact characteristic of Roman art on the whole. In archaic, Greek statues, like the one on the left were generic, used for idealized images of both men and gods, and in particular, the youthful god Apollo. We see him represented with the same body type in this fragmentary vase painting, in which he appears as a shiny cult statue looking out from his temple. His left hand holds the bone, which clearly identifies him as Apollo, while in his extended right hand, he holds out an offering dish. In the Greek world, the gesture and the dish had a clear religious meaning as a libation, which was a small offering of liquid poured onto the ground or onto an altar on behalf of the gods or for the dead. This same gesture is replicated in late Hellenistic and Roman bronzes made in the archaic style, three examples of which are shown here, including our tray bearer on the right. Neither of the other two statues were found with tray attachments, but given their striking similarity to the example from Pompeii, it remains a definite possibility that they too were destined to carry trays in Roman households. In its new Roman context, the archaic gesture of offering has been dramatically changed. What was previously a symbolic form of attention directed at the gods has been rendered profane and literal with the Roman beholder as its new recipient. The distinctive conventions of the archaic style nevertheless lend this statue its unique form of attentiveness. The figure's stiff pose suggests an aptitude for tray bearing and with the tray in place and loaded with cups, one would have hardly noticed that the tray's handle seems to sprout from the figure's open palm. The archaic face also takes on new significance when it was worn by such a servile figure. The wide open stair and the enigmatic archaic smile seem in this new context to express something like a quiet contentedness to be of service. My second tray bearer has been known since the 16th century and in the 18th century he acquired the nickname of the Italino, which is Italian for little idle. His stance is an example of the classical contrapasto with the weight shifted to one leg and the hips knocked out of their horizontal alignment. The Romans associated this particular innovation in representing the human form with polyclitus, the great Greek sculptor of the classical period who was active in the middle of the fifth century BC. He is credited with the original of the statue on the right which has survived in a few Roman marble copies including this one in the British Museum. The bronze is therefore a classicizing statue made for a Roman patron sometime in the late first century BC but in a style highly evocative of much earlier fifth century polyclite and sculpture. Characteristic of the Romans eclectic approach to Greek models is the way that the sculptors of the bronze have reversed the polyclite and pose making the figure's weight rest on the right rather than his left leg. Classical and classicizing statues such as these speak a very different figure language from archaic statuary. With their downturned gazes and their quiet gestures their attentiveness seems withdrawn as if in their own world. In the Greek world of the fifth century the Italino's gesturing right arm would have probably held an offering dish creating an image of a pious athlete pouring a libation for the gods before or after an athletic competition. His classical figuration takes on an entirely new significance however with the addition of the tray. On the right we see a fragment of the Italino's bronze tray frame in the form of a grapevine and at left we see a drawn reconstruction of the full tray restored to the figure's lowered left hand. In this photographic reconstruction which I've made with Photoshop we can better see how the tray activates the offering gesture which is now a very literal inducement for the observer to partake of the banqueting implements that the figure offers from his tray. Furthermore his attention is now centered upon the tray not unlike this ancient statue of a young tray bearing girl on display in Rome's Palazzo Massimo. The girl appears to be a religious attendant and the heavy tray of ritual implements that she carries is occupying her full attention not to mention her physical strength. The result is that she is oblivious to the viewer and the viewer in turn is invited to look at her and to enter imaginatively into her ritual activity. This more traditional example of artistic attentiveness helps to demonstrate the novelty of the Italino whose attention is not introverted but rather externalized, manifesting in the world of the observer as an appeal not only to look but to engage with the statue in an exchange that is physical and indeed social. My third and final example is this bronze statue discovered in the house of Caius Fabius Rufus in Pompeii. The pose and the rendering of the bodily forms are more advanced here than in the previous two boys and conform to Greek styles of the fourth century BC. The pose in particular recalls statues created by Praxiteles, a fourth century Greek sculptor famous for this leaning Apollo with a lizard. While our Roman bronze has a fleshier, more boyish body, his pose is characterized by the same dramatic extension of the body into space via his outstretched arm. With his long hair falling onto his shoulders, the bronze could represent either Apollo or the god of wine, whom the Greeks called Dionysus and the Romans Bacchus. With his tray in place, the latter identity seems confirmed since the bronze apparatus that serves as the tray stand is exuberantly Venus, taking the form of a grapevine loaded with fruit. It is a fitting form given that the tray itself is likely to have held cups. The playful conceit is that it is Bacchus, the god of wine himself, who is serving as cup bearer for the banqueting guests. Other Greek and Roman statues represent the wine god in a similar pose with one arm raised above his head and holding a bunch of grapes. In the bronze, however, the pose has become gesture, forcefully soliciting the viewer's attention. We can imagine that his raised hand might have been fitted with a drinking cup or been supplied with a bunch of real grapes when the statue was displayed during a banquet. The pose and the grapes that had for long been features of the god's iconography have crossed into the realm of the beholder's reality. Whereas the marble statues at left and right provide an image of Bacchus as the patron of wine and its pleasures, the tray bearer has succeeded in incorporating the god into the actual ritual of drinking since it is from his tray that the guests will take their cups. What I hope to have demonstrated with my three examples is the particularly Roman way of engaging with the history of Greek art. To conclude, I want to turn very briefly to the modern reception of these Roman objects, which has not been altogether positive. Art historians have for long preferred to see them as pristine works of sculpture and in particular, bronze sculpture which survives in the material record much less frequently than marble. When 19th and 20th century commentators did acknowledge their trays and the fact of their functionality, it was usually with some embarrassment and with an admission that the Romans did not always respond in good taste to true works of Greek art. The legacy of this distaste is still with us today, most obviously in the way that these statues are displayed in museums, almost always without their trays as we have seen. To ignore their functionality, however, is to disregard one of the Romans' unique contributions to the history of sculpture. Looking beyond the iconography and the styles of Greek statuary, the Romans engaged instead with its figural language, what I have been describing as the quality of attentiveness. As we have seen, the Romans took this quality to new extremes and with dramatic results. They created statues that no longer appeared attentive, but that literally participated in their beholder's experiential present as servants attending to their masters. The reworking of form into function entailed a simultaneous transformation of the beholder, whose new roles surpassed that of the traditional viewer in a novel and social engagement with the work of art. And while we might question the artistic integrity of such objects, which look uncomfortably kitschy to modernize, it is necessary to acknowledge the strength of their Roman appeal. In their desire for greater intimacy with the art of the Greek past, the Romans succeeded in making their Greek statues return their own avid attentions. Thank you.