Demonstrates how ancient Roman mural paintings stood at the intersection of contemporary social, ethical, and aesthetic concerns.

The focus of this volume is on the aesthetics, semantics and function of materials in Roman antiquity between the 2nd century B.C. and the 2nd century A.D. It includes contributions on both architectural spaces (and their material design) and objects – types of 'artefacts' that differ greatly in the way they were used, perceived and loaded with cultural significance. With respect to architecture, the analysis of material aesthetics leads to a new understanding of the performance, imitation and transformation of surfaces, including the social meaning of such strategies. In the case of objects, surface treatments are equally important. However, object form (a specific design category), which can enter into tension with materiality, comes into particular focus. Only when materials are shaped do their various qualities emerge, and these qualities are, to a greater or lesser extent, transferred to objects. With a focus primarily on Roman Italy, the papers in this volume underscore the importance of material design and highlight the awareness of this matter in the ancient world.

This book connects the emergence of Latin love elegy and a new, tender style in Roman wall painting.

A groundbreaking ecocritical study that examines how ideas about the natural and built environment informed architectural and decorative trends of the Roman Late Republican and Early Imperial periods. Landscape emerged as a significant theme in the Roman Late Republican and Early Imperial periods. Writers described landscape in texts and treatises, its qualities were praised and sought out in everyday life, and contemporary perceptions of the natural and built environment, as well as ideas about nature and art, were intertwined with architectural and decorative trends. This illustrated volume examines how representations of real and depicted landscapes, and the merging of both in visual space, contributed to the creation of novel languages of art and architecture. Drawing on a diverse body of archaeological, art historical, and literary evidence, this study applies an ecocritical lens that moves beyond the limits of traditional iconography. Chapters consider, for example, how garden designs and paintings appropriated the cultures and ecosystems brought under Roman control and the ways miniature landscape paintings chronicled the transformation of the Italian shoreline with colonnaded villas, pointing to the changing relationship of humans with nature. Making a timely and original contribution to current discourses on ecology and art and architectural history, Shaping Roman Landscape reveals how Roman ideas of landscape, and the decorative strategies at imperial domus and villa complexes that gave these ideas shape, were richly embedded with meanings of nature, culture, and labor.

This book provides an enquiry into the distinguishing traits of Greek and Roman figural imagery. A detailed analysis of a wide range of material conveys an understanding of the figural imagery of classical antiquity as a whole, counterbalancing studies conducted on single genres. Through in-depth studies of six major production categories—Greek painted pottery, Roman decorated walls, Greek gravestones, Roman sarcophagi, Greek and Roman official sculpture, and Greek and Roman coins—the reader gains insights into the making of classical figural imagery. The images are explored within their contextual frameworks, paying attention to both functional purposes and pictorial traditions. Image–viewer relations offer a perspective that is maintained across the chapters. The bottom-up approach and the many genres of imagery discussed provide the basis for an extensive synthesis. Lavishly illustrated with over 100 images, Excursions into Greek and Roman Imagery provides a valuable resource for students of classical antiquity and history of art. The book also offers classical scholars, museum curators and others interested in classical art a fresh approach to the figural imagery of antiquity.

First full-length study of the cultural identity of the Ionian Greeks in Western Asia Minor under Roman rule.

Examines in detail the local, historical, and material circumstances that distinguish different types of Roman Hellenism

"Roman imagery and iconography are typically studied under the more general umbrella of Roman art and in broader, medium-specific studies. This handbook focuses primarily on visual imagery in the Roman world, examined by context and period, and the evolving scholarly traditions of iconographic analysis and visual semiotics that have framed the modern study of these images. As such topics-or, more directly, the isolation of these topics from medium-specific or strictly temporal evaluations of Roman art-are uncommon in monograph-length studies, our goal is that this handbook will be an important reference for both the communicative value of images in the Roman world and the tradition of iconographical analysis. The chapters herein represent contributions from a number of leading and emerging authorities on Roman imagery and iconography from across the world, representing a variety of academic traditions and methods of image analysis"--

Few surviving works of classical literature have cast the haunting, hilarious, insightful, and eerie spell conjured by the Satyricon of the Neronian courtier and eventual victim Petronius. Fragmentary, opaque, and enigmatic, at times it seems that deception and obfuscation are the favorite tricks of its author. A Reading of Petronius’ Satyricon offers a fresh look at this genre-defying masterpiece, proceeding episode by episode and scene by scene through a vision of the hell that humanity has fashioned for itself. Petronius mercilessly and exactingly appraises Rome’s embrace of the Golden Age dreams of the Augustan principate, judging his fellow citizens and himself by the yardstick of the Neronian reign that broods over them like an avenging specter. Petronius' Satyricon offers medicine for ambulatory corpses, a prescription that consists of notifying the dead of the diagnosis, and of pointing out the inevitable and eminently logical antidote for those consumed by insatiable hunger and unfulfillable longing. Bitterly sardonic and preternaturally serene, Lee Fratantuono’s reading reveals Petronius to be nothing less than the ultimate literary voice of a dying dynasty, a prose and poetic verbal magician of serious intention, a virtuoso in the art of unmasking the ghoulish horror and inconsolable sadness that lurk often just below the surface of the comic.

This volume presents the results of the fourteenth workshop of the international network 'Impact of Empire'. It focuses on the ways in which Rome's dominance influenced, changed, and created landscapes, and examines in which ways (Roman) landscapes were narrated and semantically represented. To assess the impact of Rome on landscapes, some of the twenty contributions in this volume analyse functions and implications of newly created infrastructure. Others focus on the consequences of colonisation processes, settlement structures, regional divisions, and legal qualifications of land. Lastly, some contributions consider written and pictorial representations and their effects. In doing so, the volume offers new insights into the notion of ‘Roman landscapes’ and examines their significance for the functioning of the Roman empire.