I was looking at busts of Roman emperors after falling into a rabbit hole on a random post. It was about Maximinus Thrax and I was blown away by the detail. So I googled up other emperors and famous Romans, like Julius Caesar, and wondered whether there were celebrated sculptors and artists like Raphael or Velazquez at the time, and who they were.
So, do we know any superstar Roman artists, sculptors and the like?
Should I limit the question to a time frame? How about the period of the 5 good emperors.
Maybe a good follow up question in case we don't know any would be, when did artists begin to be recognized in history?
Thanks in advance!
The short answer is, not much. Most Roman sculpture, from the Republican to the Later Imperial period, can be divided into one of two categories: the 'ideal' and the portrait. The latter is self-explanatory: portrait busts, as well as portraits of the dead on funeral steles. The former encompasses full-length figures of deities and heroes. There was also architectural sculpture, in the form of metopes, reliefs and friezes, although this was employed less extensively in Roman than in Greek architecture.
The vast majority of surviving Roman figures tend to be marble copies of lost Greek bronzes. Many of the best-known antique sculptures, such as the Apollo Belvedere, the Farnese Hercules and the Venus de' Medici, are 1st or 2nd century AD Roman copies of earlier Greek works. The curious thing is that, while few of these works are signed and little written reference is made is to the Roman artists who must have carved these works, we are able to name many of the Greek sculptors who produced the originals, e.g. Praxiteles, Leochares and (earlier) Lysippos and Phidias. There are a few surviving Roman names, e.g. the Farnese Hercules is signed by 'Glykon', a Greek name but presumably of a sculptor working in Rome - but other than that, we nothing of him.
In answer to your broader question, the first historiographical treatment of individual artists in Europe is arguably Giorgio Vasari's The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects. First published in 1550, Vasari's Lives consisted of a series of biographical essays on artists from Cimabue and Giotto up to his own time, presenting the development of art as one of stylistic progress from 13th century barbarity to 16th century perfection. Of course, he was not the first person to identify the worth of individual, named artists - nor were individual artists of the medieval period lacking in recognition in their day - but the Lives were the first work to present the figure of the artist as an individualised 'genius', in a manner that has influenced art writing up to the present day.