The works of the ancient Romans, unlike the Greeks, were dominated by symbolism and allegory. Accordingly, plastic images of the Greeks were replaced with a picturesque place by the Romans. Sculptures like maenads Scopas or Nike of Samothrace, were no longer created, but the unrivaled sculptural portraits with extremely accurate transmission of individual features of face and character, as well as reliefs and reliably fixed-historical events belonged to the Romans.
A Roman master unlike the Greek one, who saw reality in its plastic unity, was more inclined to the analysis, dismemberment of the whole into parts, a detailed picture of a phenomenon. The Greeks saw the world as if through all combining and connecting poetic haze of a myth. For the Romans it began to dissipate, and the phenomena were seen in more distinct forms, which were easier to learn, but they also led to a loss of sense of wholeness of the universe. In ancient Rome, sculpture was limited mainly to historical reliefs and portraits. The Romans understanding of the relationship of artistic form and space was new. This principle was manifested in sculpture. Plastic form of the Greek athletes was always presented openly. The images, like the praying Roman, are mostly enclosed in itself, becoming extremely focused. The Roman masters in sculptural portraits focused on the personal and individual aspects. The relation of the Romans to shape, volume and space is quite different from the Greeks, being based on the principle of breaking boundaries and borders for dynamic creative thinking. In this sense, the Roman art is a new stage of human exploration of the aesthetic reality. Roman artists showed gravity to classical Hellenic forms, causing a sense of duality of Roman monuments.
Therefore, the Roman and Greek sculpture have a lot in common, but clearly, the Romans tried to develop already existing norms by enlarging shapes and meanings.
References
Henig, Martin. (1983). A Handbook of Roman Art. …