In the main hall of the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, beneath the vast iron-and-glass vault of the former railway station, stands a bronze that makes explicit what Gérôme’s paintings kept implicit. A man in contemporary nineteenth-century dress — smock, trousers, the clothes of a working artist — stands beside a Roman gladiator. The gladiator is armored, helmeted, standing over a fallen opponent whose arm is raised in the gesture of submission. The contemporary figure reaches toward the gladiator with a sculptor’s tool. This is Jean-Léon Gérôme’s self-portrait with his own creation: the artist inside the ancient world he spent his career constructing, the boundary between the nineteenth century and the Roman arena dissolved by the act of making.

In the Cast Courts of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, two enormous plaster columns rise through the full height of the room, split at the midpoint because no single gallery space in Victorian London was tall enough to accommodate the complete original. Red walls, a cast-iron skylight, medieval tomb effigies on the floor below, the Column of Marcus Aurelius visible behind — it is one of the stranger and more magnificent rooms in any museum in the world, and the centerpiece is a reproduction. The V&A made these casts of Trajan’s Column in the 1860s at the request of Pope Pius IX and Queen Victoria, who both wanted to study the reliefs without traveling to Rome. The decision proved more consequential than either of them anticipated. The original column, standing since 113 AD in Trajan’s Forum in Rome, has weathered continuously for nineteen centuries. The Victorian plaster casts now preserve detail that the stone in Rome has since lost. The reproduction is, in some respects, more legible than the original.

The Medea Sarcophagus in Berlin’s Altes Museum is 227 centimeters long and 65 centimeters high, carved from white marble in Rome around 140–150 AD, found near the Porta San Lorenzo on the city’s eastern edge. It is one of the finest examples of Roman mythological sarcophagus relief in any collection, and it depicts, in four continuous scenes reading left to right, the story of a woman who poisoned her rival, murdered her own children, and escaped in a dragon-drawn chariot to avoid the consequences. This is what a wealthy Roman family chose to carve on the box that would hold someone’s bones. The choice is not self-evidently logical. Making sense of it requires understanding something about how Rome thought about death that is not immediately obvious from the surface of the stone.

In a case in the Altes Museum in Berlin, ten painted wooden panels are arranged across two shelves: five on the upper row, five below. They show men, women, and children. The youngest is perhaps eight or nine years old. The oldest appears to be in his fifties, though age is difficult to assess with confidence from encaustic wax portraits of the first through third centuries AD. What is not difficult to assess is the gaze. Every one of these faces looks directly out of the panel, directly at whoever is standing in front of the case, with the same frontal directness. They were painted to look at you. Eighteen centuries later they still do, and the effect has not diminished.

A museum case in Berlin’s Altes Museum holds a collection of Roman domestic bronzes from Rome and Pompeii, first through fourth century AD, under a label that states its subject with admirable directness: Luxury in the Roman house. The contents repay attention. Two griffins — mythological hybrids of eagle and lion, rendered with precise musculature — served as the decorative supports of a folding table, their bodies forming the legs, their wings providing the lateral bracing. A satyr and nymph group, extravagantly detailed, formed the foot of a large bronze vessel. Small bronze ducks and swans — the fulcra — decorated the scroll-ends of couches and dining beds, the curved terminals that distinguished a proper Roman reclining couch from mere functional furniture. Two portrait busts on red marble pedestals completed the ensemble. None of this was structural. All of it was mandatory, in the sense that a wealthy Roman household without this level of decorative investment was announcing, inadvertently, that its owner could not afford it.

Ancient Rome has not left contemporary art alone, and contemporary art has not left ancient Rome alone. The relationship between them is different from the academic tradition’s engagement — less archaeologically earnest, more ironic, more interested in the tension between the ruin and its meanings than in the reconstruction of what the ruin was before it ruined. Contemporary artists approaching Rome approach a subject already saturated with prior appropriations: the neoclassical, the Victorian, the fascist, the cinematic. To paint or photograph or install Rome now is to navigate a layered history of representations that is itself part of the subject.

Giovanni Battista Piranesi arrived in Rome in 1740 at the age of twenty and spent the rest of his life there, producing approximately one thousand etchings of the ancient and modern city that changed how Europeans understood ruins and, through ruins, understood time. His Vedute di Roma — the Views of Rome — documented the ancient monuments with a precision that made them available to architects, scholars, and artists across Europe who could not travel to see the originals. His Carceri d’Invenzione — the Imaginary Prisons — invented spaces of impossible scale and mechanical complexity that influenced the visual imagination of the Gothic tradition, science fiction, and everything in between. His archaeological publications — the Antichità Romane — were serious scholarly contributions to the understanding of Roman building techniques. He was simultaneously a documentarian, a fantasist, and a polemicist, and the three modes were not always separable.

The assassination of Julius Caesar on the Ides of March, 44 BC, has been painted repeatedly across five centuries of European art, and the accumulated versions constitute a case study in how the same historical event can be made to mean entirely different things depending on the visual choices made around it. The event is fixed: Caesar was killed in the Theater of Pompey by a group of senators. The meaning of the event — was it tyrannicide or murder, liberation or catastrophe — has been contested ever since, and the paintings rehearse that contest in visual terms.