How do we know who ancient statues are supposed to be?

Question

When an ancient statue or sculpture is discovered with no writing, how do they always seem to assign it to someone? Like it’ll just be some random statue and they’re like oh that’s such and such 3rd century Roman nobleman yada yada. Like how do they know? I’ve seen the same with discovered tombs.

In: 36

Answer 1

There is a bit of a selection bias there, statues of unknown characters are generally not displayed because they are not interesting. They sit somewhere in a warehouse with mountains of other uncategorized stuff that is old enough that nobody wants to throw it away, but not interesting enough to make it to museum display.