The other main art form found in private houses is sculpture. Here we must distinguish between the religious statuettes of the household shrine (the
Lares, the genius of the paterfamilias, and the protecting deities of the household) and works which were more purely decorative or ostentatious. The
latter can again be divided. On the one hand there were small figurines designed to be kept on shelves or sideboards in private parts of the house, for
example the terracottas including a gladiator, a porter, Venus arranging her hair, and two slaves carrying a litter, all less than 16 cm. high, found in the
family quarters of the House of M. Lucretius at Pompeii, or the even smaller bronze figurines (a seated philosopher, an old man milking a goat, and an
ape brandishing arms) from the ruins of the upper storey of the House of the Marbles, also at Pompeii. On the other hand there were the statues,
statuettes, and reliefs which were displayed in gardens and other open parts of the house. These raise the same programmatic questions as wall-
paintings and merit closer attention.
In most cases domestic sculptural displays were somewhat arbitrarily compiled and arranged. The need to 'shop around' for available pieces presented
a totally different situation from that involved in commissioning a mural decoration and naturally led to heterogeneous collections. The great and
wealthy imported works from Greece, but not always with great discrimination, as we can judge from Cicero's requests to Atticus to supply him with
sculptures for his villa at Tusculum: 'anything you consider suitable for the palaestra and gymnasium ... reliefs to be set in the plaster of the atriolum
and a couple of figured well-heads'. Apparently almost any pieces would do so long as they were Greek. Even the sculptures of Hadrian's Villa at
Tivoli seem to have been employed in a rather haphazard way. The statues round the Canopus ('Egyptian pool') included a splendid crocodile and
much other appropriately Egyptian or egyptianizing material, but there were also very different items, for example copies of Classical Greek wounded
Amazons, figures of Hermes and Ares, a statue group showing Scylla and her victims, and replicas of the Erechtheum caryatids. Since Hadrian and his
successors were presumably better able than most patrons to get what they wanted, this heterogeneous assortment could hardly have been dictated
solely by market forces.
The private collection about whose arrangement we know most is that of the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum, from which no fewer than eighty-
seven sculptures were recovered and all their find-spots recorded. The late-republican or early-Augustan aristocrat who formed the collection, perhaps
L. Calpurnius Piso Pontifex, the consul of 15 B.C., was clearly a man of culture rather than of great artistic sensibility: his penchant for busts of Attic
orators, Stoic and Epicurean philosophers, and early-Hellenistic dynasts evinces an interest in humanistic studies, but the artistic quality of the
collection was variable, ranging from excellent copies of Greek masterpieces to second-rate pastiches and decorative hackwork. Such programmatic
arrangements as can be discerned were superficial and not consistently carried through (despite the efforts of modern commentators to argue
otherwise). For example, in the large peristyle two figures of runners, a statuette of the seated Hermes, and busts of various philosophers evoked the
idea of a gymnasium, but interspersed with them were Hellenistic condottieri, animal figures, and drunken satyrs-strange bedfellows indeed. Hermes
actually sat back to back with one of the inebriates. Indeed this latter grouping illustrates the point that compositional balance, well exemplified by the
favourite Roman device of pairing statues in mirror image, was more important to the householder than thematic correspondence.