Honorific practices and the politics of space on Hellenistic Delos: Portrait statue monuments along the dromos

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2013-04-01

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Abstract

The statue landscape of Hellenistic cities and sanctuaries was constantly changing, but the process of the gradual accrual of statues is customarily elided on site plans, which tend to show-if they represent statue bases at all-the final phase of this long and complex process. Investigating the way statue landscapes developed over time can provide a better understanding of the political, social, and spatial dynamics at play in portrait dedication. This article takes as a case study for such an approach the portrait statue monuments set up along the dromos of the Sanctuary of Apollo on Delos. Our aim is to unpack the processual dimension of this statuary display by representing this process visually through phase plans and a three-dimensional model of the dromos made in Trimble SketchUp. Parsing into phases the gradual accumulation of statues along the dromos reveals the historical dimension of statue dedication and exposes the tensions between individual and group identity that could be negotiated visually through the location, material, and size of a portrait monument. Finally, we argue that imaginative reconstruction can help us think through the implications of display context for sculptural style: the ever-increasing number of portrait statues in the Late Hellenistic period may have been a driving force behind the stylistic changes that occurred in Late Hellenistic portraiture.

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10.3764/aja.117.2.0207

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Dillon, S, and E Baltes (2013). Honorific practices and the politics of space on Hellenistic Delos: Portrait statue monuments along the dromos. American Journal of Archaeology, 117(2). pp. 207–246. 10.3764/aja.117.2.0207 Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/14602.

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Dillon

Sheila Dillon

Anne Murnick Cogan Distinguished Professor of Art and Art History

Sheila Dillon received a Ph.D. in Classical Art and Archaeology from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. She teaches courses on Greek and Graeco-Roman art and archaeology. Her research interests focus on portraiture and public sculpture and on reconstructing the statuary landscape of ancient cities and sanctuaries. Her books include The Female Portrait Statue in the Greek World (2010); Ancient Greek Portrait Sculpture: Contexts, Subjects, and Styles (2006), which was awarded the James R. Wiseman Book Award from the Archaeological Institute of America in January 2008; Roman Portrait Statuary from Aphrodisias (2006); and an edited volume A Companion to Women in the Ancient World (2012). Professor Dillon was a member of the Aphrodisias Excavations in Turkey from 1992-2004, has worked at the Sanctuary of the Great Gods on the island of Samothrace, and now spends summers doing fieldwork in Athens. Her current research includes a collaborative project to publish the portrait sculpture from the Excavations in the Athenian Agora with a group of current and former students, and a digital mapping project of the history of the archaeological excavations in the Agora, a collaborative endeavor centered in the Wired! Lab that involves undergraduate and graduate students at Duke. Professor Dillon was the Editor-in-Chief of the American Journal of Archaeology from 2013-2016.



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