EXCERPT: “Go to any major museum to see ancient Greek statuary and you’ll find wall labels that read “Roman copy.” It’s ironic given that modernism taught us that the hallmark of true genius is originality. Yet if the Romans hadn’t copied the Greeks, the Western canon as we know it wouldn’t exist. Many masterpieces bear their mark, as the famed Laocoön and His Sons (c. 42–20 BCE), now believed to a Roman copy — and a much-revised one — reveals. If it had been known as such, its restoration, overseen by none other than Raphael himself, would likely never have happened, nor would the many copies of it, commissioned afterward, exist. The same can be said of the Venus de Milo (c. 100 BCE), another Hellenistic sculpture, if not a Roman copy. Had the French clocked her as a Hellenistic statue and not a classical one when the armless beauty was discovered in 1820, it would’ve languished in the heap of ruins from which it came, given the much-maligned status of Hellenistic art at the time. Buried along with it would’ve been all the future art it inspired, by generations of artists including René Magritte, Arman, Yayoi Kusama, Jeff Koons, and Zhu Cheng, among others. As the oldest canonical work to be continually copied by artists, these appropriations remain as instrumental to the work’s iconic fate as its early misattribution, underscoring again the role of the copy in a canon that’s long denigrated it.”
https://flash---art.com/article/after-the-master-the-copy-as-origin-and-renewal/