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Ancient Obscenities inquires into the Greco-Roman handling of explicit representations of the body in its excretory and sexual functions, taking as its point of departure the modern preoccupation with the obscene. The essays in this volume offer new interpretations of materials that have been perceived by generations of modern readers as “obscene”: the explicit sexual references of Greek iambic poetry and Juvenal’s satires, Aristophanic aischrologia, Priapic poetics, and the scatology of Pompeian graffiti. Other essays venture in an even more provocative fashion into texts that are not immediately associated with the obscene: the Orphic Hymn to Demeter, Herodotus, the supposedly prim scripts of Plautus and the Attic orators. The volume focuses on texts but also includes a chapter devoted to visual representation, and many essays combine evidence from texts and material culture. Of all these texts, artifacts, and practices we ask the same questions: What kinds of cultural and emotional work do sexual and scatological references perform? Can we find a blueprintfor the ancient usage of this material?

 

 

Roman Art in the Private Sphere presents an impressive case for the social and art historical importance of the paintings, mosaics, and sculptures that filled the private houses of the Roman elite. The six essays in this volume range from the first century B.C.E. to the fourth century C.E., and from the Italian peninsula to the Eastern Empire and North African provinces.

"This is a stimulating book and should be compulsory reading for all students of Roman art."
---Classical Review

 

"[A] model exploration into the ways private décor can be used to facilitate a larger understanding of Roman art and society."
---Classical World

 

Roman Art in the Private Sphere presents an impressive case for the social and art historical importance of the paintings, mosaics, and sculptures that filled the private houses of the Roman elite. The six essays in this volume range from the first century BCE to the fourth century CE, and from the Italian peninsula to the Eastern Empire and North African provinces, treating works of art that belonged to every major Roman housing type: the single-family atrium houses and the insula apartment blocks in Italian cities, the dramatically sited villas of the Campanian coast and countryside, and the palatial mansions of late antique provincial aristocrats. This new edition includes a fresh contribution by editor Elaine Gazda, tracing the developments in the treatment of private Roman art since the publication of the original edition of Roman Art in the Private Sphere.

 

Elaine K. Gazda is Professor of the History of Art and Curator of Hellenistic and Roman Antiquities at the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology, University of Michigan.

In recent decades, the study of Roman art has shifted focus dramatically from issues of connoisseurship, typology, and chronology to analyses of objects within their contemporary contexts and local environments. Scholars challenge the notion, formerly taken for granted, that extant historical texts—the writings of Vitruvius, for example—can directly inform the study of architectural remains. Roman-era statues, paintings, and mosaics are no longer dismissed as perfunctory replicas of lost Greek or  Hellenistic originals; they are worthy of study in their own right. Further, the scope of what constitutes Roman art has expanded to include the vast spectrum of objects used in civic, religious, funerary, and domestic contexts and from communities across the Roman Empire.

The work gathered in Roman Artists, Patrons, and Public Consumption displays the breadth and depth of scholarship in the field made possible by these fundamental changes. The first five essays approach individual objects and artistic tropes, as well as their cultural contexts and functions, from fresh and dynamic angles. The latter essays focus on case studies in Pompeii, demonstrating how close visual analysis firmly rooted in local and temporal contexts not only strengthens understanding of ancient interactions with monuments but also sparks a reconsideration of long-held assumptions reinforced by earlier scholarship.

These rigorous essays reflect and honor the groundbreaking scholarship of Elaine K. Gazda. In addition to volume editors Brenda Longfellow and Ellen E. Perry, contributors include Bettina Bergmann, Elise Friedland, Barbara Kellum, Diana Y. Ng, Jessica Powers, Melanie Grunow Sobocinski, Lea M. Stirling, Molly Swetnam-Burland, Elizabeth Wolfram Thill, and Jennifer Trimble.

The foundation of the American Academy in Rome dates back more than one hundred years to the early decades of the last century. Over the years, the Academy has acquired a study collection of material goods from antiquity, including coins, statues and figurines, lamps, stucco and other architectural fragments, jewelry, and inscriptions. While most are Roman in origin, some pieces are Greek or Etruscan. Some were gifts, others come from long-ago excavations, a few were bought. The Collection of Antiquities of the American Academy in Rome, the latest addition to the Supplements to the Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome series, focuses on highlights of the collection. Sections of the work are written by area specialists, with introductory material contributed by volume editors Larissa Bonfante and Helen Nagy, both of whom have published widely in archaeology and art history.

"Art and architecture are mirrors of a society. They reflect the state of its values, especially in times of crisis or transition." Upon this premise Paul Zanker builds an interpretation of Augustan art as a visual language that both expressed and furthered the transformation of Roman society during the rule of Augustus Caesar. The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus illustrates how the establishment of monarchy under Augustus Caesar led to the creation of a new system of visual imagery that reflects the consciousness of this transitional age.