ARTH 425 Roman Art and Archaeology

The Etruscans were the most powerful force in central Italy until Roman unification of the peninsula. Vestiges of their art, architecture, and unique language have long intrigued scholars, and the search for this mysterious civilization continues to fire the imagination. Despite a history of pillage, rich archaeological evidence survives: thousands of tombs, many of them frescoed and filled with vases, sculpture, jewelry, and metalwork; and the mysterious Etruscan sites that are places of tourist pilgrimage, such as Cerveteri, Vulci, and Tarquinia. In this new book, the first survey of its kind in more than twenty years, Nigel Spivey brings the Etruscan world to life, illuminating the social, political, and cultural context of the art objects and artifacts that remain the singular achievement of the Etruscans.

Beginning in the eighth century B.C., an expanse of central Italy extending from the edges of the Po River plain to the shores of the Tyrrhenian Sea became the setting for the civilization of the Etruscans. This well-organized and richly illustrated book examines the discoveries and masterpieces of the Etruscan world. Unforgettable paintings, works in gold, and sculpture in terracotta and bronze were created by the Etruscans, while extraordinary painted vases were imported from Greece. Scattered throughout central Italy and marked by a variety of architectural forms, ancient cemeteries can be found at the seashore, carved into tufa, clinging to cliff walls, or buried beneath the fields.

This new collection presents a rich selection of innovative scholarship on the Etruscans, a vibrant, independent people whose distinct civilization flourished in central Italy for most of the first millennium BCE and whose artistic, social and cultural traditions helped shape the ancient Mediterranean, European, and Classical worlds. Offers fresh perspectives on Etruscan art and culture, including analysis of the most up-to-date research and archaeological discoveriescreativity

Michael Grant has specially selected some of the most significant examples of painting, portraits, architecture, mosaic, jewellery and silverware, to give a unique insight into the functions and manifestations of art in the Roman Empire. Art in the Roman Empire shows how many of the most impressive masterpieces were produced outside Rome, on the frontiers of its enormous empire.

This book consists of a comprehensive collection of ancient literary evidence on Roman art and artists, assembled together in translation and provided with linking passages to set the historical context.

A wide-ranging survey of the subject from the founding of Rome to the rule of Rome's first Christian emperor, Constantine. Focuses throughout on the overarching themes of Rome's cultural inclusiveness and art's important role in promoting Roman values. Discusses a wide range of Roman painting, mosaic, sculpture, and decorative arts, as well as architecture and associated sculptures within the cultural contexts they were created and developed

Beginning in the second century, with its rich revival of ancient learning and artistic practices, and ending in the fifth with Christian narrative and liturgical cycles and the pilgrimage arts, this book explores the art of the Roman Empire by tackling two inter-related periods of internal transformation: the 'Second Sophist' ( c. ad 100-300), and the era of late antiquity ( c. ad 250-450). Vases, murals, statues, and masonry are explored in relation to such issues as power, death, society, acculturation, and religion. By examining questions of reception, viewing, and the culture of spectacle alongside the more traditional art-historical themes of imperial patronage and stylistic change,

This book develops a theory for the understanding of Roman pictorial art. By treating Roman art as a semantic system it establishes a connection between artistic forms and the ideological messages contained within. The author shows different stylistic forms being used for different themes and messages. The reception of Greek models, a key phenomenon of Roman art, thus appear in a new light. The formulations of specific messages are established from Greek art types of different eras serving to express Roman ideological values: classical forms for the grandeur of the state, Hellenistic forms for the struggling effort of warfare. In this way a conceptual and comprehensible pictorial language arose, uniting the multicultural population of the Roman state.

Traditional studies of Roman art have sought to identify an indigenous style distinct from Greek art and in the process have neglected the large body of Roman work that creatively recycled Greek artworks. In this fresh assessment the author offers instead a cultural history of the functions of the visual arts, the messages that these images carried, and the values that they affirmed in late Republican Rome and the Empire. The analysis begins at the point at which the characteristic features of Roman art started to emerge, when the Romans were exposed to Hellenistic culture through their conquest of Greek lands in the third century BCE. As a result, the values and social and political structure of Roman society changed, as did the functions and characters of the images it generated.

D'Ambra discusses patronage on different social levels, from that of the emperor and his court to those of shopkeepers and of artisans, in diverse regions of the empire and in distinct ethnic groups. She draws on a range of sculptures, wall paintings, decorative arts, coins and architecture, from Italy to the edges of the empire, evoking the traditionalism and the adaptability of Roman art.

Sir Mortimer Wheeler describes the architecture and town planning, thesculpture and painting, the silverware, glass, pottery and the otherrich artistic achievements of the era.

In this study, Eleanor Winsor Leach offers a new interpretation of Roman painting as found in domestic spaces of the elite classes of ancient Rome. Because the Roman house fulfilled an important function as the seat of its owner's political power, its mural decoration provides critical evidence for the interrelationship between public and private life. Relying on contemporary literary sources, this book also integrates historical and semantic approaches to an investigation of the visual language through which painting communicates with its viewers. It also offers a fresh perspective on the demography of Pompeii and the relationship between colony and Rome as reflected in its wall painting.

Political image-making--especially from the Age of Augustus, when the Roman Republic evolved into a system capable of governing a vast, culturally diverse empire--is the focus of this masterful study of Roman culture. Distinguished art historian and classical archaeologist John Pollini explores how various artistic and ideological symbols of religion and power, based on Roman Republican values and traditions, were taken over or refashioned to convey new ideological content in the constantly changing political world of imperial Rome.

Provides the first comprehensive study of the lives of Roman women as revealed in Roman art. Over 150 black and white illustrations of works of art - sculpture, portrait busts, paintings, relief carvings, jewelry, coins, textiles.

Accompanying an exhibition at the Yale University Art Gallery and the McMullen Museum of Art at Boston College, the book presents material that is both chronologically and geographically distant from imperial Rome, the better to characterize and understand local responses and identities within the provinces as they were expressed through material culture.

Portraits are among the most compelling artistic records of Greek and Roman culture. In this richly illustrated book featuring all new photography, the 60 portrait heads from the Metropolitan Museum's renowned collection are fully described, and placed in their historical and cultural contexts.

Encompassing over four thousand years of artistry and innovation, this resource spans every art form, medium and civilization from Cycladic, Minoan, Helladic, and Etruscan art to the fall of the Roman Empire.

Explores the art and culture around the Bay of Naples before Mount Vesuvius erupted in AD 79.

Using extensive state-of-the-art CGI animation this documentary chronicles the spectacular as well as sordid history of the Roman Empire from the rise of Julius Caesar in 55 BC to its fall around 537 AD. The CGI animation gives the viewers an opportunity to see Rome's greatest structures the way the ancient Romans saw them.