CFP CAA 2025 - STILL DEFINING ROMAN ART
Anne Hrychuk KontokostaIt has now been a decade since Christopher Hallett called upon scholars to "define" Roman Art. ("Defining Roman Art", in A Companion to Roman Art, edited by B. Borg, Malden, MA, 2015). Hallett described how, in order to distinguish new Roman production from the Greek tradition, scholars rely upon carefully selected genres of Roman visual culture, for example, historical relief or veristic portraiture, that are overtly distinct from earlier Greek production. This approach deafeningly excludes from the conventional corpus of Roman Art other categories of Roman visual production, such as those focusing on mythological, heroic, and religious subjects, small scale private items, Roman copies or versions of Greek originals, or objects tied to Early Christian iconography or patronage, among others. This session seeks to reflect on, re-evaluate, and expand upon this challenge to the field of Roman art history, examining ways that scholars now strive both to add new material and to reintroduce neglected objects traditionally placed beyond the disciplinary scope of Roman art history. We will also query the still-undefined relationship between post-Enlightenment (capital-A) "Art", material culture, and design, as well as between artists, craftspeople, designers, architects, and builders in both ancient Roman thought and contemporary scholarship. Our goal is to broaden the scope and discussions of Roman Art and visual culture and to maintain academic interest in innovative methodological approaches to the field of Roman art history.
Related papers
Toward a new interpretation of Roman art
Toward a new interpretation of Roman art, 2022
In this essay I investigate the most important approaches to visual arts in the Roman world. Thus the theory that visual arts were dead, the opinion that 'modern' works are better than ancient ones, the importance of artists until the late Antonine period, the process which led to an anonymous art are issues which are discussed in these twelve lectures.
Panel - “Rethinking the Boundaries: Visual Culture in the Roman Provinces and beyond”
Panel accepted for the Classical Association Conference 2018. University of Leicester. Recent studies on various aspects of material culture in the Roman provinces have revealed the importance of local, as well as global, factors in shaping the lives individuals led across the Empire by considering objects in their own context. Scott and Webster (2003) highlighted the potential for provincial art to inform our understanding of the societies which created it by moving away from aesthetic judgment and colonialist perspectives. However, the tendency to view evidence in terms of a sliding scale of artistic competence and understanding of an ideal form imposed by the centre still prevails, and there is still much scope to re-evaluate provincial evidence, as recently demonstrated by Alcock, Egri and Jackes (2017). Following previous (and recent) theoretical and methodological bases, this panel travels across the spatial and temporal boundaries of the Roman Empire, from the first overseas province of Sicily via North Africa and Spain, to the imperial possession of Britain, to uncover different aspects of everyday life by interrogating objects on their own terms. Papers dismiss physical, as well as conceptual limits traditionally created between: Rome and the provinces, administrative and natural limits, ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’, ‘art’ and ‘archaeology’, ‘Roman’ and ‘indigenous’, ‘imported’ and ‘local’ to investigate whether Rome brought peace, a wasteland, or a different dynamic entirely to the boundaries of the Empire. References Alcock, S., Egri, M. and Frakes, F. 2017. Beyond Boundaries: Connecting Visual Cultures in the Provinces of Ancient Rome. Scott, S. and Webster, J. 2003. Roman Imperialism and Provincial Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
AFTERWORD: THE FUNCTION OF GREEK ARTWORKS WITHIN ROMAN VISUAL CULTURE
Restaging Greek Artworks in Roman Times, 2018
'Culture's Visual Culture: The Iconography of Education and of Intellectual, Musical and Literary Pursuits in Roman Art' in Was ist Bildung in der Vormoderne? Ed. by Peter Gemeinhardt, pp. 109-165.
Was ist Bildung in der Vormoderne? Ed. by Peter Gemeinhardt. Studies in Education and Religion in Ancient pre-Modern History in the Mediterranean and Its Environs, 4., 2019
“A Time of Synthesis:” Roman Art at Midcentury.
“A Time of Synthesis:” Roman Art at Midcentury.
Paper given at Biblioteca Hertziana: Max-Planck-Institut für Kunstgeschichte. Rome, Italy. March 2019 as part of Rome Contemporary initiative. Video available at: https://video.ibm.com/recorded/120744497
Towards a cultural biography of Roman painting
Journal of Roman Archaeology , 2019
Using a term drawn from economic anthropology 1 and pushing the boundaries of this of the technical, stylistic and iconographic know-how that gave form to Roman painting. Considering the fragmentary nature of the evidence at our disposal, the argumentation set forth here cannot follow a linear path containing various steps that can all be neatly demonstrated. I believe that the time is right, however, to tackle Roman painting-and-standing the rôle and nature of the patrons and painters remains an objective that is still far in Roman painting and the concrete ways and contexts in which the process unfolded. The aim is to achieve a deeper understanding of the rôle that this artistic technique played in a society that made ample use of it during a fundamental phase of its history. In the 1st c. B.C. and 1st c. , in the brief period that saw the transition from Republic to Empire, the domestic ideology of Roman society found expression in a decorative system marked by a continuous stream of innovations with respect to themes, schemes and ornament that were adopted consistently by a broad spectrum of patrons. Indeed, beyond simply protecting nature as we are dealing with here-added a wide range of elements which I believe it is useful to investigate. and Hellenistic painting. 2 interests of the 20th c., the study of Roman painting per se was considered to be of no great interest. In this way an important tool for understanding the meaning of a broad artistic process was lost. Indeed, despite the gaps in the historical record, a thorough analysis of Roman painting suggests that it continued to sustain-to a far greater degree than we are accustomed to considering-an artistic and craft tradition of the highest sophistication.
Nicola Barham, Esteemed Ornament: an Overlooked Value for Approaching Roman Visual Culture (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018).
Nikolaus Dietrich and Michael Squire (eds)., Ornament and Figure in Graeco-Roman Art, 2018
STILL DEFINING ROMAN ART
Session will present: On location
It has now been a decade since Christopher Hallett called upon scholars to “define” Roman Art. (“Defining Roman Art”, in A Companion to Roman Art, edited by B. Borg, Malden, MA, 2015). Hallett described how, in order to distinguish new Roman production from the Greek tradition, scholars rely upon carefully selected genres of Roman visual culture, for example, historical relief or veristic portraiture, that are overtly distinct from earlier Greek production. This approach deafeningly excludes from the conventional corpus of Roman Art other categories of Roman visual production, such as those focusing on mythological, heroic, and religious subjects, small scale private items, Roman copies or versions of Greek originals, or objects tied to Early Christian iconography or patronage, among others. This session seeks to reflect on, re-evaluate, and expand upon this challenge to the field of Roman art history, examining ways that scholars now strive both to add new material and to reintroduce neglected objects traditionally placed beyond the disciplinary scope of Roman art history. We will also query the still-undefined relationship between post-Enlightenment (capital-A) “Art”, material culture, and design, as well as between artists, craftspeople, designers, architects, and builders in both ancient Roman thought and contemporary scholarship. Our goal is to broaden the scope and discussions of Roman Art and visual culture and to maintain academic interest in innovative methodological approaches to the field of Roman art history.
Keywords:
Topics: Ancient Roman
Time Period: 500 BCE to Fifth Century
Topics: Art History
Topics: Methodologies
Medium: Sculpture
Chairs:
Anne Hrychuk Kontokosta, New York University and Peter D De Staebler, Pratt Institute
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