'Pseudo-Athlete': statue of an Italian merchant or official from the House of the Diadumenus on Delos (early first century B.C.). A
good example of the unfortunate effects which could result from the practice of adding contemporary portrait heads to mechanically
reproduced bodies based on classical athlete statues.
If contact between the Italian and Hellenistic traditions spawned a golden age in architecture, the situation is less clear-cut in
sculpture. Much of the effort of sculptors from the mid second century onwards was devoted to producing classicizing work for the
Roman art market. In Athens the so-called Neo-Attic school developed a popular line in marble garden ornaments (great fountain-
basins and craters, candelabra, and the like) decorated with reliefs of elegant nymphs, satyrs, and maenads, beautifully carved, but
devoid of all feeling. In southern Italy the school of Pasiteles concentrated upon eclectic statuary in the Classical manner, often
amalgamating a Polyclitan or Praxitelean pose with an early Classical head: surviving works include stylistically improbable pairs of
figures engaged in conspiratorial conversation. Along with these pastiches went the production of more or less mechanical replicas
of famous statues. The earliest specimens, including a fine copy of Polyclitus' Diadumenus found on Delos, date from about 100 B.
C. and are thought to be the result of improvements in the pointing technique; they represent the beginnings of a major industry, a
vivid testimony of which are the plaster casts of parts of famous Greek statues excavated in the 1950s at Baiae near Naples. Not all
such copies were intended for collectors. An important aspect of the industry was the reproduction of statue-bodies to carry
contemporary portrait heads, a practice which did not always yield harmonious results.
This sort of arid Classicism continued well into the Imperial period and often found new roles for itself, particularly in the
manufacture of pairs of statues in mirror image for the decoration of the niches which were a popular feature in Roman architecture.
Alongside it another current, associated as far as we know primarily with Rhodian sculptors, created baroque masterpieces in the
style of the Great Altar at Pergamum. The Laocoon and the Homeric compositions in Tiberius' grotto at Sperlonga are the main
survivors of this mode, designed largely for the private delectation of emperors (below, pp. 666, 783).