The Hellenistic society of the Rhodian metropolis, a naval aristocracy (Gabrielsen), dedicated bronze statues of their members in the sanctuaries and public buildings and used marble and -occasionally-lartios lithos to carve portrait-statues originally for funerary use and in a later period also for honorific purposes, figures of deities and decorative sculpture for the houses and the parks. The artists, local and itinerant, from Athens, the islands and the Asia Minor, established artistic workshops on Rhodes, some of them active for three centuries and for more than one generation. The impact of Rhodian art is evident on the islands of the Aegean and the cities of Asia Minor, due to the expansion of the Rhodian Peraia. Together with Pergamon, Rhodes emerges as a productive artistic centre of the Hellenistic era, creating statuary types and combining them with landscape elements. The radiance of its art is evident in the late Hellenistic period in Rome, the new capital of the world, where the Rhodian artists create mythological statuary groups set in grottoes. This volume presents the large-scale Rhodian sculpture of the Hellenistic and Roman period through the publication of sixty unpublished sculptures of life size or larger than life size, together with forty-five sculptures already published. The sculptures are grouped according to their statuary type (gods, mortals and portraits), while those unable to be firmly identified due to their fragmentary condition are grouped under the category ‘uncertain identification’. The presentation of the sculptures is further supplemented by a technical description and an analysis of stylistic characteristics according to chronological development. Excavation data, wherever available, are also provided.
