This historic 1933 publication documents the important collection of Egyptian, Greek and Italian pottery assembled in the early years of what is now the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology. This collection, brought together in part for teaching purposes, contains a wide range of classic pottery types and is illustrative of the development of pottery over time in these Mediterranean cultures.

Sculptured figural motifs were an important component of many buildings in the Hellenistic world, and their frequent relegation to subsidiary status has, until now, left our knowledge of both Hellenistic architecture and sculpture incomplete. In Hellenistic Architectural Sculpture, Pamela A. Webb examines the full range of figural embellishment - from simple to complex, on large monuments as well as on more obscure ones, and in the major population centers as well as the smaller cities, sanctuaries, and isolated areas throughout western Anatolia and the Aegean islands. In this book, the first to focus specifically on the figural adornment of Hellenistic architecture, Webb provides extensive information about the chronology and interpretation of figural motifs adorning religious, civic, commercial, commemorative, and domestic constructions. She finds that figural sculptures adorn structures at every level from the ground to the roof, and display a wide variety of motifs on such architectural elements as columns, walls, entablatures, pediments, and cornices. 142 illustrations of Hellenistic monuments - temples, altars, cult buildings, heroa, theaters, bouleuteria, stoas, gymnasia, and houses - and their sculptured adornment complement the author's descriptions and analyses. The book features an extensive bibliography, citing resources from the early nineteenth century to the most recent publications.

A detailed study of Neolithic rock paintings in southern France, the majority of which lie to the east of the Rhone. Hameau discusses the theoretical and methodological aspects of studying schematic figures and motifs before presenting a large inventory of sites where each is described in terms of its location and situation, and in terms of the art found there. His final analysis of the art, the association between figures, animals and motifs, and the use of space, convince him that there was a set of precise rules followed by those who created the art. French text, short English summary.

"Clarke teaches us to think about how this art was understood and felt by those who lived with it in their daily lives and he speculates that it might even reflect what the Romans actually did. This is the first genuinely contextual and theoretically informed study we have of a vast panoply of classical art about sex. It will be an illuminating book for classicists, historians, and anybody else who finds lovemaking interesting."--Thomas Laqueur, author of "Making Sex

"There are few scholars as able to take on this material, as well versed in theories of sexuality, and as comfortable dealing with both heterosexual and homoerotic content as Clarke. The topic is timely and the execution is professional."--Natalie Kampen, Barnard College

"This book should attract not only classicists, but also scholars of sexuality in any field. Clarke succeeds both in introducing little-known material and in defamiliarizing the familiar examples of erotic art."--Anthony Corbeill, University of Kansas

""Looking at Lovemaking proves that the ancients were very different from you and me--that they saw sex not primarily as procreation and never as sin but rather as sport, art, and pleasure, an activity full of humor, tenderness and above all variety. John R. Clarke, by looking at Roman artifacts from several centuries destined to be used by different social classes, reveals that the erotic "visual record is far more varied, open-minded and playful than are "written moral strictures, which were narrowly formulated by the elite and for the elite. This book is at once discreet and bold--discreetly respectful of nuance and context, boldly clear in drawing the widest possible conclusions about themalleability of human behavior. Clarke has, with meticulous scholarship and a fresh approach, vindicated Foucault's revolutionary claims for the social construction of sexuality."--Edmund White, author of "The Beautiful Room is Empty

This text aims to overturn the frequent dismissal of Roman art as 'mosaics and uninspiring copies of Greek sculpture'. In place of the usual historical outline approach, this book looks at the subject by genre and considers the attitudes of Romans themselves to art. Drawing on literary sources as well as illustrations from many parts of the Roman world, this survey of Roman art to the time of Constantine considers what Romans hoped to achieve and how far they were successful.

It is too often forgotten that every Assyrian “historical� inscription functioned in a very specific context. This context influenced its content and the way in which it was perceived by ancient viewers and readers. Russell’s goal is to address the reconstruction of the context of these inscriptions in order to elucidate their original impact. In the past, the palace inscriptions, including Assyrian palace inscriptions, have been published in composite editions with little or no reference to the provenience of the individual exemplars; in addition, the original excavation reports often were more interested in the content of the inscriptions than in their locations. To achieve the objective of placing these inscriptions in their original contexts and thereby provide a base for further study of them, and stimulated by two seasons of renewed excavations at Nineveh during which he studied many inscriptions in situ, Russell returned to the British Museum and Layard’s original, handwritten notes from the 19th century excavations at Nineveh—the goal being to catalogue fully and as completely as possible the individual inscriptions and their locations. The results of Russell’s labors are here published, including the first publication of several shorter inscriptions. The book is lavishly illustrated, both with museum photos and with photos by the author of many of the inscriptions in situ. The book will no doubt be the basis of all further study of the relationship between inscription and context in the palaces of the Assyrian kings.

Plato and Aristotle both believed that the arts were mimetic creations of the human mind that had the power to influence society. In this they were representative of a widespread consensus in ancient culture. Cultural and political impulses informed the fine arts, and these in turn shaped--and were often intended to shape--the living world. The contributors to this volume, all of whom have been encouraged and inspired by the work of Peter Green, document the interaction between life and the arts that has made art more lively and life more artful in sixteen essays with subjects ranging from antiquity to modern times.
With topics ranging from "Antigone" to D. H. Lawrence and Norman Douglas, and from Bactrian coins to Livy's characterization of women, the scope, the zest, and the scholarship of these essays will illuminate new avenues in our understanding of the relationship between classics and culture, and in our appreciation of both the artistic products that have come down to us and the varieties of life from which they spring.

Alexander the Great changed the face of the ancient world. During his life and after his death, his image in works of art exerted an unprecedented influence-on marbles, bronzes, ivories, frescoes, mosaics, coins, medals, even painted pottery and reliefware. Alexander's physiognomy became the most famous in history. But can we really know what meaning lies behind these images?
Andrew Stewart demonstrates that these portraits--wildly divergent in character, quality, type, provenance, date, and purpose--actually transmit not so much a "likeness" of Alexander as a set of carefully crafted cliches that mobilize the "notion" "Alexander" for diverse ends and diverse audiences. Stewart discusses the portraits as studies in power and his original interpretation of them gives unprecedented fullness and shape to the idea and image called "Alexander."

Das Thema des Buches ist der Isiskult wdhrend der rvmischen Kaiserzeit, wie er in zahleichen Darstellungen der dgyptischen Gvttin und solcher ihr angeglichener Frauen zum Ausdruck kommt. Wdhrend sich dadurch zum einen diese Frauen ganz allgemein als Dienerinnen der Isis zu erkennen geben, fdllt zum anderen ein besonderes Licht auf die zur Angleichung ausgewdhlten Bilder der Gvttin. Dabei handelt es sich, anders als bei den meisten bekannten Isistypen, um keine mythologisch erkldrbaren Gottesbilder. Sie sind deshalb der Forschung ebenso rdtselhaft geblieben wie die entsprechend angeglichenen und oftmals auch als Priesterinnen oder Mystinnen bezeichneten Frauen. Das Buch behandelt somit zwei Problemkreise, ndmlich die Stellung jener Frauen im Kult sowie die damit verbundene Frage nach Sinn und Bedeutung der f]r die Angleichung verbindlichen Isisbilder.
Das vorwiegend plastische Material ist in einem Katalog mit volstdndigem Abbildungsteil zusammengestellt. Auf dieser Basis bietet das Buch eine ikonographische und ikonologische Untersuchung des Themas. Die ausschliesslich in statuarischen Kopien ]berlieferten Isisbilder werden in angemessener Weise auf Originale hin rezensiert; die vorranging sepulkralen Darstellungen der Isisdienerinnen werden sowohl in quellenkritischer als auch archdologischer Hinsicht interpretiert. Daneben kommen auch religionsgeschichtliche Probleme zum Tragen. Ein ldngeres Exkurs am Ende des Buches ist der Frage nach der sozialen Stellung der Isisdienerinnen gewidmet.

This comprehensive catalogue of ancient terracotta oil lamps found in Cyprus situates the objects within larger cultural and social contexts and elucidates their varied decoration The fourth catalogue in a series that documents the renowned Cesnola Collection of Cypriot Art, this book focuses on the collection's 453 terracotta oil lamps dating from the Classical, Hellenistic, Roman, and Early Byzantine periods. The rich iconography on many of these common, everyday objects offers a rare look into daily life on Cyprus in antiquity and highlights the island's participation in Roman artistic and cultural production. Each lamp is illustrated, and the accompanying text addresses the objects' typology, decoration, and makers' marks while providing new insights into art, craft, and trade in the ancient Mediterranean. Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Distributed by Yale University Press

An epic new history of Ancient China told through the prism of a dozen extraordinary tombs The three millennia up to the establishment of the first imperial Qin dynasty in 221 BC cemented many of the distinctive elements of Chinese civilisation still in place today: an extraordinarily challenging geography and environment, formidable infrastructure, a society based on the strict hierarchy of the family, a shared written script of characters, a cuisine founded on rice and millet, a material culture of ceramics, bronze, silk and jade, and a unique concept of the universe, in which ancestors continue to exist alongside the living. Records of these early achievements, and their diverse and unexpected expressions, often lie not in written history, but in how people marked the end of their lives: their dwellings for the afterlife. Tombs, and the treasures within them, are almost the only artefacts to survive from Ancient China; their scale and sophistication rivals their equivalents in Ancient Egypt. Jessica Rawson, one of the most eminent Western scholars of China, explores twelve grand tombs - each from a specific historical moment and place - showing how they reveal wider political, dynastic and cultural developments, culminating in the lavish ambition of the First Emperor's monument, guarded by his army of terracotta warriors. Beautifully illustrated and drawing on the latest archaeological discoveries, Life and Afterlife in Ancient China illuminates a constellation of beliefs about life and death very different from our own and provides a remarkable new perspective on one of the oldest civilisations in the world.

Through the 19th century, as archaeology started to emerge as a systematic discipline, plaster casting became a widely-adopted technique, newly applied by archaeologists to document and transmit discoveries from their expeditions. The Parthenon sculptures were some of the first to be cast. In the late 18th century and the first years of the 19th century, the French artist Fauvel and Lord Elgin's men conducted campaigns on the Athenian Acropolis. Both created casts of parts of the Parthenon sculptures that they did not remove and these were sent back to France and Britain where they were esteemed and displayed alongside other, original sections. Henceforth, casting was established as an essential archaeological tool and grew exponentially over the course of the century. Such casts are now not only fascinating historical objects but may also be considered time capsules, capturing the details of important ancient works when they were first moulded in centuries past. This book examines the role of 19th century casts as an archaeological resource and explores how their materiality and spread impacted the reception of the Parthenon sculptures and other Greek and Roman works. Investigation of their historical context is combined with analysis of new digital models of the Parthenon sculptures and their casts. Sensitive 3D imaging techniques allow investigation of the surface markings of the objects in exceptionally fine detail and enable quantitative comparative studies comparing the originals and the casts. The 19th century casts are found to be even more accurate, but also complex, than anticipated; through careful study of their multiple layers, we can retrieve surface information now lost from the originals through weathering and vandalism.

Combining the studies of modern film, traditional narratology, and Roman art, this interdisciplinary work explores the complex and highly visual techniques of Tacitus' Annales. The volume opens with a discussion of current research in narratology, as applied to Roman historians. Narratology is a helpful and insightful tool, but is often inadequate to deal with specifically visual aspects of ancient narrative. In order to illuminate Tacitus' techniques, and to make them speak to modern readers, this book focuses on drawing and illustrating parallels between Tacitus' historiographical methods and modern film effects. Building on these premises, Waddell examines a wide array of Tacitus' visual narrative devices. Tacitean examples are discussed in light of their narrative effect and purpose in the Annales, as well as the ways in which they are similar to contemporary Roman art and modern film techniques, including focalization, alignment, use of the ambiguous gaze, temporal suggestion and quick-cutting. Through this approach the modern scholar gains a deeper understanding of the many ways in which Tacitus' Annales act upon the reader, and how his narrative technique helps to shape, guide, and deeply layer his history.

This much-anticipated publication of two major Lydian excavation sectors at Sardis is the first in-depth presentation of the architecture and associated pottery and other artifacts found in the houses of inhabitants of this legendary city. It traces continuous occupation outside the city walls from the Late Bronze Age to the middle of the sixth century BC, when the Persians under Cyrus the Great captured the capital city of King Croesus. This book represents a remarkable synthesis of a vast quantity of everyday materials into a vivid picture of daily life in early Sardis in the period when the Lydians were conquering most of western Turkey. The authors describe many small structures and a wealth of artifacts that collectively document the lives of ordinary Lydians, in what appear to be both domestic and craft contexts. Because the Lydians maintained cultural and economic contacts throughout the eastern Mediterranean and the Near East, scholars working in Greece, Anatolia, and the Near East will find this first presentation of Lydian pottery and other objects, as well as vernacular architecture, of great interest and value. The two-volume book discusses the chronology, history, and evidence of everyday life, and catalogues nearly 800 objects, illustrated by more than 300 color plates of photos and detailed drawings.

Ancient Athenians were known to reuse stone artifacts, architectural blocks, and public statuary in the creation of new buildings and monuments. However, these construction decisions went beyond mere pragmatics: they were often a visible mechanism for shaping communal memory, especially in periods of profound and challenging social or political transformation. Sarah Rous develops the concept of upcycling to refer to this meaningful reclamation, the intentionality of reemploying each particular object for its specific new context. The upcycling approach drives innovative reinterpretations of diverse cases, including column drums built into fortification walls, recut inscriptions, monument renovations, and the wholesale relocation of buildings. Using archaeological, literary, and epigraphic evidence from more than eight centuries of Athenian history, Rous's investigation connects seemingly disparate instances of the reuse of building materials. She focuses on agency, offering an alternative to the traditional discourse on spolia. Reset in Stone illuminates a vital practice through which Athenians shaped social memory in the physical realm, literally building their past into their city.

This is the first in a series of seven books that describe and illustrate the seminal architectural traditions of the world. It describes the origins of the Classical tradition in the mountain temples of Sumer, the pyramids of Egypt and the ziggurats of Mesopotamia. The story continues with the temples, theatres, palaces and council chambers of ancient Greece and Rome, and finishes with the adoption of Classical models to house the new institutions of Christian Europe. Excursions along the way take in Mesoamerica and the Andean littoral, and Africa. Not simply a profusely illustrated catalogue of buildings, the book also provides their political, technological, social and cultural contexts. It functions equally well as a detailed and comprehensive narrative, as a collection of the great buildings of the world, and as an archive of themes across time and place.

The long and vibrant history of north-eastern England has left rich material deposits in the form of buildings, works of art, books and other artefacts. This heritage is examined here in fifteen studies, ranging from the sculpture of the Roman occupation through the monuments and architecture of the Anglo-Saxon and Norman periods, to the manuscripts and fortified houses of the later Middle Ages. The monasteries at Hexham, Lindisfarne and Tynemouth, and the City of Newcastle itself, are all subjected to individual analysis, and there are papers on Alnwick and Warkworth castles, the great keep at Newcastle, the coffin of St Cuthbert and the Lindisfarne Gospels. The expert opinions presented here are intended to stimulate and advance scholarly debate on the material culture of a region which has played a critical role in English history, and whose broad and varied profile still offers many opportunities for critical inquiry.

In 2006, the collection of 224 antiquities assembled by Walter Kempner, M.D. was donated to the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University by Barbara Newborg, M.D. Ranging from the 3rd millennium to the 3rd century B.C.E., the collection includes Mediterranean antiquities such as Cycladic marble artifacts; Greek ceramics attributed to significant Athenian painters, including the Kleophrades Painter, the Athenian Painter, and the Matsch Painter; and carved amber likely from an Etruscan workshop. In "The Past Is Present," scholars and Duke University students present the collection, including many objects that have never been published before, and discuss its significance for art history, classics, museum studies, and archaeology. The introductory essay by Kimerly Rorschach, Director of the Nasher Museum, discusses the gift in the context of current issues surrounding the acquisition of antiquities and the aims of university museums.

Contributors
Carla Antonaccio
Elizabeth Baltes
Larissa Bonfante
Kaila Davis
Sheila Dillon
Robert Dudley
Susan Foster
Kiki Fox
Alex Jorn
Christina Kaplanis
Mary King
Anna Kivlan
Lindsay Levine
Michael Ma
Jennifer Morris
Jenifer Neils
Daven Reagan
Kimerly Rorschach
Brendan Saslow
Tyler Jo Smith
Andrew Tharler

Publication of the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University

In Family Fictions in Roman Art, Natalie Kampen reveals the profoundly de-naturalized ways in which family could be represented in the interests of political power during the Roman Empire. Her study examines a group of splendid objects made over the course of six hundred years, from carved gems to triumphal arches to ivory plaques, and asks how and why artists and their elite patrons chose to depict family to speak of everything from gender to the nature of rulership, from social rank to relationship itself. In the process, artists found new and often strikingly odd ways to give form to families from conquered lands and provinces as well as from the Italian countryside and the court. The book s contribution is in its combination of close attention to the creativity of Roman art and interest in the visual language of social and political relationships in a great Empire.

Scattered throughout their coastal homelands, the remains of impressive artworks produced by the Moche of northern Peru survive. These works include ceremonial centers extensively decorated with murals, as well as elaborate and sophisticated ceramic vessels, textiles, and metalwork, that serve to visually represent an ancient American culture that developed a complex, systematized pictorial code used to communicate narratives, sets of ideas, and ideological constructs.

In this study, Margaret Jackson analyzes Moche ceremonial architecture and ceramics to propose the workings of a widely understood visual language. Using an interdisciplinary approach that incorporates archaeology and linguistics with art history and studies of visual culture, Jackson looks at the symbolism of Moche art as a form of communication, the social mechanisms that produced it, and how it served to maintain the Moche social fabric.

In early June 1902, John Peters, an American theologian, and Hermann Thiersch, a German classical scholar, were alerted to the discovery of two painted burial caves at Marisa/Beit Jibrin, less than 40 miles (62 km) by road southwest from Jerusalem. Tomb robbers had, a short time previously, forced their way into the burial chambers and caused damage to their fabric. Realising that these splendid tombs dated to about 200 BCE and the importance of their painted interiors, the two scholars immediately commissioned a leading Jerusalem photographer, Chalil Raad, to record them. This was fortunate, because the paintings on the soft limestone walls rapidly deteriorated and now can no longer be seen. Peters and Thiersch published a monograph on the painted tombs, illustrated with hand-drawn copies of the photographs, but the original plates have lain all these years in the archives of the Palestine Exploration Fund in London, unpublished. The paintings are unique in the Greek pictorial repertoire and are among the most important surviving examples of Ptolemaic art. The remarkable painted frieze extending along the two long sides of the main chamber of Tomb I depicts 22 different animal species, drawn from the wild fauna of the Levant, the Nile basin and the Horn of Africa - as well as a few mythical beasts. This animal frieze attests to the interest in exotic animals shown in the Hellenistic period. Other remarkable subjects represented in the Marisa paintings include Cerberus, the three-headed guard-dog of Hades, and a pair of elegant musicians in Greek dress. Timed to coincide with the centenary of the discovery of the painted tombs, a new study on the paintings has been produced by David Jacobson. This study appears as Annual VII of the Palestine Exploration Fund. It contains, for the first time, high quality reproductions of the photographic plates taken in 1902, which are held in the PEF collections. Reproduced with the photographs are the proofs of the coloured lithographs, which are superior in quality to the versions that were published. The inaccuracies and loss of delicate detail of the originals in the coloured lithographs used by Peters and Thiersch for their 1905 publication are clearly apparent. The accompanying text includes an analysis of all the paintings in the light of a century of scholarship and an assessment is made of their religious and cultural significance. Each of the animals in the frieze is compared with descriptions given by ancient writers, and a new interpretation is presented of the cycle as a whole. An appraisal is made of the overall contribution of the Marisa paintings to our knowledge of the art and culture of the Levant in the Ptolemaic period. Included with this new study is facsimile reprint of the original 1905 publication, now long out of print, and it includes superior copies of the coloured lithographs from that edition. This new publication also reproduces a very rare addenda section prepared by R.A.S. Macalister after inspecting the Marisa tombs in October of that year.

The reliefs of the column of Marcus Aurelius in Rome are used extensively for the illustration of Roman soldiers. However, despite the fact that in the last decades a number of sites at the Danube Limes have been analyzed, where numerous militaria from the Markomannic Wars have emerged, there is no comparison between this work of official Roman art and the archaeological finds. This book aims to address this lacuna. Each piece of equipment of the Roman soldier is analyzed in its sculptural representation and compared with the existing finds as well as supplementary comparisons with secondary sources. The result is a broad picture of the Roman army under Marcus Aurelius and of Rome's depiction of their forces in state propaganda. In addition, the present work comprehensively separates the antique parts of the frieze from the additions made during the late Renaissance for the first time and thus provides a solid basis for future archaeological and art historical evaluations.

A characteristic shared by the Roman and Byzantine illustrated calendars is that they represent the twelve months of the year, referable to an iconographic repertoire which is divided into three themes: the astrological-astronomical, the festive-ritual and the rural-seasonal. With regard to the first type, the months are depicted through images of the signs of the zodiac, often associated with images of the guardian deities of the months; the second category includes depictions of the months that refer to some important religious festivals; finally, the third theme includes images of the months that allude to the most important work activities performed in the countryside. The figurative calendars, which in most cases are made on mosaics, are characterized by a wide distribution in terms of time, concentrated between the 3rd and 6th century, and geography, with the areas of greatest attestation consisting of Italy, Africa Proconsularis, Greece and Arabia. With regard to the architectural context, the calendars from the West are prevalently documented in the domus, while those from the East are particularly attested in ecclesiastical buildings. The aim of research presented in this volume is the in-depth study of the connections between the meaning of the iconography of the Roman and Byzantine illustrated calendars and their historical and cultural context. Italian description: La caratteristica comune dei calendari figurati romani e bizantini consiste nella rappresentazione dei dodici mesi dell'anno, riferibile a un repertorio iconografico articolato in tre temi: quelli di tipo astrologico-astronomico, festivo-rituale e rurale-stagionale. Per quanto riguarda la prima tipologia, i mesi sono raffigurati mediante le immagini dei segni zodiacali, spesso associate a quelle delle divinita tutelari mensili; la seconda categoria include quelle raffigurazioni dei mesi che si riferiscono ad alcune importanti festivita religiose; la terza tematica, infine, comprende quelle immagini dei mesi che alludono alle piu rilevanti attivita lavorative svolte in ambito campestre. I calendari figurati, realizzati nella maggioranza dei casi su mosaico, si contraddistinguono per un'ampia distribuzione in senso temporale, con una concentrazione cronologica fra il III e il VI secolo d.C., e geografico, con le aree di maggior attestazione costituite dall'Italia, l'Africa Proconsularis, la Grecia e l'Arabia. In merito invece al contesto architettonico, i calendari di provenienza occidentale sono documentati in prevalenza presso le domus, mentre per quanto concerne quelli orientali, sono attestati in particolare negli edifici ecclesiastici. L'obiettivo della ricerca presentata in questo volume si focalizza sull'approfondimento delle connessioni esistenti tra il significato dell'iconografia dei calendari figurati romani e bizantini e il loro contesto storico- culturale.

First published in 1988. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Designed to be a useful travel companion, this book's descriptions and interpretative analyses help show the monuments in a new way, through an understanding of the historical, artistic and political events that contributed to their creation. Through the text and the illustrations we get to know the gods and heroes who were worshipped on the Acropolis, the leaders who envisaged the major projects, the artists who brought them to fruition, as well as the innovative ideas they applied, and the Athenian citizens who admired and enjoyed these achievements. 95 colour illustrations. French language edition. Also available in English, Greek, Russian, Spanish and German.