Spanning centuries and the vastness of the Roman Empire, The Last Statues of Antiquity is the first comprehensive survey of Roman honorific statues in the public realm in Late Antiquity. Drawn from a major research project and corresponding online database that collates all the available evidence for the 'statue habit' across the Empire from the late third century AD onwards, the volume examines where, how, and why statues were used, and why these important features of urban life began to decline in number before eventually disappearing around AD 600. Adopting a detailed comparative approach, the collection explores variation between different regions-including North Africa, Asia Minor, and the Near East-as well as individual cities, such as Aphrodisias, Athens, Constantinople, and Rome. A number of thematic chapters also consider the different kinds of honorand, from provincial governors and senators, to women and cultural heroes. Richly illustrated, the volume is the definitive resource for studying the phenomenon of late-antique statues. The collection also incorporates extensive references to the project's database, which is freely accessible online.

A revised edition of a classic title, now with digitally restored photographs, showcasing the finest surviving examples of ancient Buddhist art. Since their chance re-discovery in 1819, the breathtaking paintings and sculptures of the Ajanta caves have inspired and delighted experts and amateurs alike. Ranging in date from the second century BCE to the sixth century CE, these ancient Buddhist artworks rank among the world’s most important cultural treasures. Benoy K. Behl captured the beauty and luminosity of these works using long exposures and only natural light and now presents them here digitally restored to show the paintings closer to their original glory than ever before. The exquisite murals, depicting the tales of previous incarnations of Buddha, scenes of princely processions and fantastical birds and beasts, provide virtually the only evidence of painting styles that first developed in India and remain crucially important to the understanding of Buddhist art throughout Asia. On UNESCO’s list of World Heritage Sites, the Ajanta caves survive as a potent symbol of the great beauty of India’s rich artistic past. This new edition provides for the first time a view of some of the masterpieces of Ajanta painstakingly digitally restored by Behl. Sensitively carried out, the restoration makes the paintings clearer without interfering with their original grace and nuance, leading to a deeper appreciation of their artistry. Accompanied by expert commentaries to fully immerse the reader in the cultural context of the murals, this book will help preserve the legacy of the glorious art of Ajanta for years to come.

The marble halls of the British Museum might seem the natural habitat for classical sculpture, but in the nineteenth century its sombre displays were far from being the only place that people encountered antiquities. From 1854, a rival collection of classical sculpture, comprising plaster casts from major European museums and scaled down architectural features, was on show in the South London suburb of Sydenham, in the Crystal Palace which had housed the Great Exhibition of 1851. By the late 1850s, two million visitors were passing through the glass doors of the Sydenham Crystal Palace each year, more than twice as many as recorded at the British Museum. Many more people, and from a greater variety of social strata, saw the painted cast of the Parthenon frieze in Sydenham than the original in Bloomsbury. Utilizing an extensive variety of archival material, including diaries, scrapbooks and photographs, Greece and Rome at the Crystal Palace evokes visitor experiences at Sydenham, and examines the discussion that arose around the presentation of classical plaster casts to a mass audience. It uncovers the social, political, and aesthetic role of ancient Greek and Roman sculpture in modern Britain, assessing how classical art figured in debates over design reform, taste, beauty and morality, class and gender, and race and imperialism.

Written for the general visitor, the Athenian Agora Museum Guide is a companion to the 2010 edition of the Athenian Agora Site Guide and leads the reader through all of the display spaces within the Stoa of Attalos in the Athenian Agora - the terrace, the ground-floor colonnade, and the newly opened upper story. The guide also discusses each case in the museum gallery chronologically, beginning with the prehistoric and continuing with the Geometric, Archaic, Classical, Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine periods. Hundreds of artifacts, ranging from common pottery to elite jewelry held in 81 cases, are described and illustrated in color for the very first time. Through focus boxes, readers can learn about marble-working, early burial practices, pottery production, ostracism, home life, and the wells that dotted the ancient site. A timeline, maps, and plans accompany the text. For those who wish to learn more about what they see in the museum, a list of further reading follows each entry.

In this volume, Bobou offers a systematic analysis of ancient Greek statues of children from the sanctuaries, houses, and necropoleis of the Hellenistic world in order to understand their function and meaning. Comparing images of children in reliefs, terracotta figurines, and marble statutes, she shows that children and childhood became more prominent in the visual material record from the late fifth century BC, a time during which children became a matter of parental and state concern. Looking at the literary and epigraphical evidence, Bobou argues that statues of children were important for transmitting civic values to future citizens, serving as paradigms of behaviour and standing testament to the strength and future of a community. Created by adults, the statues reveal much about adult ideology and values during this period, and the expectations and hopes placed on children. The combination of iconographic studies and examination of the original locations in which statues were placed highlights the importance of children in Hellenistic society as well as their connection with specific areas of civic and social life.

The history of funerary customs in Rome contains many unanswered questions and controversial debates, especially concerning the significant developments of the second century CE. In this book, distinguished historian Barbara E. Borg employs the full range of material and written evidence to explore four key questions that change our view of Roman society and its values. For the first time, senatorial burial practices can be reconstructed and contrasted with those of other classes. Borg then explains the change from incineration to inhumation as a revival of old Roman mores that accelerated after the example set by Hadrian. In the third chapter, she argues that tombs became prime locations for promoting and displaying long family lines among the elite, which then inspired freedmen to undertake similar commemorative practices. Finally she explores the association of deceased persons with the divine and apotheosis through portraits on divine body shapes and temple tombs.

This book explores the spoliation of architectural and sculptural materials during the Roman empire. Examining a wide range of materials, including imperial portraits, statues associated with master craftsmen, architectural moldings and fixtures, tombs and sarcophagi, arches and gateways, it demonstrates that secondary intervention was common well before Late Antiquity, in fact, centuries earlier than has been previously acknowledged. The essays in this volume, written by a team of international experts, collectively argue that reuse was a natural feature of human manipulation of the physical environment, rather than a sign of social pressure. Reuse often reflected appreciation for the function, form, and design of the material culture of earlier eras. Political, social, religious, and economic factors also contributed to the practice. A comprehensive overview of spoliation and reuse, this volume examines the phenomenon in Rome and throughout the Mediterranean world.

The ancient Greeks traveled widely by sea and founded colonies in far-flung locations. On the north coast of the Black Sea were a number of such Greek settlements, places where the Greeks made contact with the local Scythian population. Greek goods were traded extensively throughout the region, and many of these often-luxurious articles eventually made their way into tombs.
From its wealth of such Greek finds from the Black Sea, the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg has lent some 175 Greek objects to an exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Villa. This richly illustrated catalogue to the exhibition presents nine essays on the archaeology of the northern Black Sea region and its history, culture, and art, including sculpture, pottery, gems, and jewelry. Written by curators at the State Hermitage Museum, Greeks on the Black Sea presents an intriguing world at once Greek and barbarian.

The book concerns female dress in Roman life and literature. The main focus is on female Roman dress as it may have been worn in daily life in Rome and in a social environment influenced by Roman culture in the time from the beginnings of the Republic until the end of the 2nd century AD. There is, however, a certain surplus as to its contents because many Latin texts also talk about mythical Greek dress and the largely fictional early Roman dress. Altogether, large parts of the history of Roman dress are only known to us through what scholars thought about it in Classical and Late Antiquity. For this reason, this book is not only about real female Roman dress, but also about the ancient pseudo-discourse on early female Roman dress, which has been taken too seriously by modern scholarship. This pseudo-discourse has been mixed together with real facts to produce an ahistorical fabric. It therefore appeared necessary to break with this old tradition and to take a completely new path. The detailed analysis of many texts on female Roman dress is the basis of this new handbook meant for philologists, historians, and archaeologists alike.

In this fully illustrated study, Rune Frederiksen assembles all archaeological and written sources for city walls in the ancient Greek world, and argues that widespread fortification of settlements and towns, usually considered to date from the Classical period, in fact took place much earlier. Frederiksen discusses the types of fortified settlement and the topography of urban fortification, and also the preservation of structures from early settlements. He also presents an architectural history of Greek fortification walls before the Classical period, and makes the intriguing observation that early monumental architecture developed just as much in fortifications as it did in early temples. This underlines the importance of the secular sphere for the development of early communities across the Greek world.

From Hesiod's first person account of his encounters with the Muses on Mount Helikon to Theokritos' nymphs, love between goddesses and mortal men provides the ancient Greeks with a way of articulating both the genealogical and cultic connection to their gods and to their past. A Moment'sOrnament examines the theme of nympholepsy--the experience of being "seized" by a nymph or a goddess--in ancient Greek cult and poetry from the Archaic to the Hellenistic period. In poetry, this topos, which is ubiquitous in many of the most well-known ancient Greek sources, focuses on the figure of the goddess, or nymph, who falls in love with a mortal man and subsequently bears a mortal child. The theme also finds its way in ritual as stories of encounters between divinities and mortal men give rise to sanctuaries centering on nymphs and nympholepts. Beyond the individual dimension of the nympholeptic experience, these narratives are also integrated within the community through both poetry and shrines. Nympholeptic narratives thus articulate key elements of the bond between mortals and immortals and the connection between myth and ritual in ancient Greece. Both the cave sanctuaries founded by ancient nympholepts and the poets' narratives of love between goddesses and their mortal lovers function as "a moment's ornament" by preserving the memory of an encounter with the otherworldly at the intersection between myth and cult.

Based on two international conferences held at Cornell University and the Freie Universitat of Berlin in 2010 and 2015, this volume is the first ever to explicitly address the destruction of plaster cast collections of ancient Mediterranean and Western sculpture. Focusing on Europe, the Americas, and Japan, art historians, archaeologists and a literary scholar discuss how different museum and academic traditions - national as well as disciplinary -, notions of value and authenticity, or colonialism impacted the fate of collections. The texts offer detailed documentation of degrees of destruction by spectacular acts of defacement, demolition, discarding, or neglect. They also shed light on the accompanying discourses regarding aesthetic ideals, political ideologies, educational and scholarly practices, or race. With destruction being understood as a critical part of reception, the histories of cast collections defy the traditional, homogenous narrative of rise and decline. Their diverse histories provide critical evidence for rethinking the use and display of plaster cast collections in the contemporary moment.

The Pronomos Vase is the single most important piece of pictorial evidence for ancient theatre to have survived from ancient Greece. It depicts an entire theatrical chorus and cast along with the celebrated musician Pronomos, in the presence of their patron god, Dionysos. In this collection of essays, illustrated with nearly 60 drawings and photographs, leading specialists from a variety of disciplines tackle the critical questions posed by this complex hub of evidence. The discussion covers a wide range of perspectives and issues, including the artist's oeuvre; the pottery market; the relation of this piece to other artistic, and especially celebratory, artefacts; the political and cultural contexts of the world that it was produced in; the identification of figures portrayed on it: and the significance of the Pronomos Vase as theatrical evidence. The volume offers not only the most recent scholarship on the vase but also some ground-breaking interpretations of it.

This is a book about classical sculptures in the early modern period, centuries after the decline and fall of Rome, when they began to be excavated, restored, and collected by British visitors in Italy in the second half of the eighteenth century. Viccy Coltman contrasts the precarious and competitive culture of eighteenth-century collecting, which integrated sculpture into the domestic interior back home in Britain, with the study and publication of individual specimens by classical archaeologists like Adolf Michaelis a century later. Her study is comprehensively illustrated with over 100 photographs.

Between the ninth and seventh centuries BC the small kingdom of Assyria in northern Iraq expanded through conquest to dominate the region from Egypt to Iran. The power of the Assyrian kings was reflected in the creation of a series of magnificent palaces in which the walls of principal rooms and courtyards were lined with huge panels of alabaster carved with images of the monarch as priest, victorious warrior and hunter. Together, the sculptures constitute some of the most impressive and eloquent witnesses of the ancient Middle East. This book serves as a superb visual introduction to what are undoubtedly some of the greatest works of art from the ancient world, showcasing a series of specially taken photographs of the British Museum's unrivalled collection of Assyrian sculptures. These stunning images capture the majesty of the Assyrian king, his magnificent court and its protecting divinities, through individual panels or extraordinary, often overlooked details, such as incised embroidery on robes, the contours of flesh and musculature, the turn of a horse's head or the order within the apparent chaos of battle. An introduction sets the sculptures in their cultural and art-historical context. A brief history of Assyria and the royal palaces is followed by an overview of their discovery, reception and understanding. These are the earliest examples of complex narrative art, and their multilayered meanings occupied entire rooms in which the raw emotion and energy of animals and humans was captured with remarkable vitality. Many of these exceptional carvings rank among the greatest achievements in the history of art.

The quality of 'monumentality' is attributed to the buildings of few historical epochs or cultures more frequently or consistently than to those of the Roman Empire. It is this quality that has helped to make them enduring models for builders of later periods. This extensively illustrated book, the first full-length study of the concept of monumentality in Classical Antiquity, asks what it is that the notion encompasses and how significant it was for the Romans themselves in moulding their individual or collective aspirations and identities. Although no single word existed in antiquity for the qualities that modern authors regard as making up that term, its Latin derivation - from monumentum, 'a monument' - attests plainly to the presence of the concept in the mentalities of ancient Romans, and the development of that notion through the Roman era laid the foundation for the classical ideal of monumentality, which reached a height in early modern Europe. This book is also the first full-length study of architecture in the Antonine Age - when it is generally agreed the Roman Empire was at its height. By exploring the public architecture of Roman Italy and both Western and Eastern provinces of the Roman Empire from the point of view of the benefactors who funded such buildings, the architects who designed them, and the public who used and experienced them, Edmund Thomas analyses the reasons why Roman builders sought to construct monumental buildings and uncovers the close link between architectural monumentality and the identity and ideology of the Roman Empire itself.

The Grove Encyclopedia of Classical Art and Architecture spans every art form, medium, and civilization the fall of the Roman Empire, The Grove Encyclopedia of Classical Art & Architecture is a comprehensive reference source on this important field of study. Drawing on the expansive scholarship of The Dictionary of Art (1996, 34 vols) and Grove Art Online, and adding dozens of new entries, the Encyclopedia includes all subject areas in the classical arts, including philosophers, rulers, writers and artists, architecture, ceramics, sculpture, and more.
Arranged alphabetically, this two-volume set contains over 800 entries tracing the development of the art forms in classical civilizations such as ancient Greece and Rome. Illustrated with 400 halftones, maps and line drawings, and 32 color plates, the Encyclopedia is a reliable and convenient resource covering this field of everlasting significance in the development of western culture.

The Apostles in Early Christian Art and Poetry presents the first in-depth analysis of the origins of the representation of the apostles (the twelve disciples and Paul) in verse and image in the late antique Greco-Roman world (250-400). Especially in the West, the apostles are omnipresent, in particular on sarcophagi and in Biblical and martyr poetry. They primarily function as witnesses of Christ's stay on earth, but Peter and Paul are also popular saints of their own. Occasionally, the other apostles come to the fore as individual figures. Direct influence from art on poetry or vice versa appears to be difficult to trace, but principal developments of late antique society are reflected in the representation of the apostles in both media.

The Museum of the Royal Tombs of Aigai was built especially to protect the monuments in the burial complex of King Philip II and to facilitate the public's access to their splendid murals, original large-scale paintings of the Classical period. In the form of an ancient tumulus and encasing the monuments, this Museum-Mausoleum is dedicated to the memory of illustrious historical figures familiar to all. This guide to the Museum of the Royal Tombs takes the reader step by step on the tour of this particularly spare and austere, yet simultaneously atmospheric, exhibition of the treasures from these tombs, which are displayed in units. Impressive photographs accompany historical information and the presentation of the exhibits, transporting the visitor through space and time, in the footsteps of the remarkable flowering of culture in the land of Macedonia during Classical Antiquity.