ABSTRACT
Throughout the Mediterranean, the excavation of Roman cities uncovers elaborate public buildings and their rich decorations, including architectural ornaments and freestanding sculptures. This urban architecture—like that at Roman Gerasa—is often reconstructed (especially when the site is a major tourist attraction), providing visitors and researchers with stunning vistas of the civic landscape of major, provincial Roman cities. However, the statues that lined the colonnaded streets or filled the niches of the city gates, theaters, bath buildings, and fountain houses are rarely restored. These ‘sculptural programs’, as they are called by scholars, are not reconstructed, in part because all of their constituent statues are seldom discovered, in part because outdoor display of Roman statuary would put these ancient artworks at undue risk, but mostly because the reconstruction of the ‘sculptural landscape’ has not been a major focus of scholarly research until recently. In fact, works of art, such as the Roman marble sculptures discovered in Jordan and throughout the ancient Near East, have been viewed more as individual museum pieces and objets d’art than as artifacts and important sources of information on social, political, and religious trends in the region. In the Roman world, however, public sculptures were reproduced in standard, easily recognizable types and were combined with one another in groups or ‘programs’ to send messages to their viewers (Marvin 1993). These sculptures and ‘sculptural programs’ were, therefore, integral parts of urban ‘aediculated’ (niche-filled) architecture, where they served not merely as decoration but also as ancient billboards, emitting messages about the functions of their buildings and about the social, political, and religious ambitions of their patrons and their cities (Stewart 2003).
