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Featuring some of the major voices in the world of art history,
this volume explores the methodological aspects of comparison in
the historiography of the discipline. The chapters assess the
strengths and weaknesses of comparative practice in the history of
art, and consider the larger issue of the place of comparative in
how art history may develop in the future. The contributors
represent a comprehensive range of period and geographic command
from antiquity to modernity, from China and Islam to Europe, from
various forms of art history to archaeology, anthropology and
material culture studies. Art history is less a single discipline
than a series of divergent scholarly fields - in very different
historical, geographic and cultural contexts - but all with a
visual emphasis on the close examination of objects. These fields
focus on different, often incompatible temporal and cultural
contexts, yet nonetheless they regard themselves as one coherent
discipline - namely the history of art. There are substantive
problems in how the sub-fields within the broad-brush
generalization called 'art history' can speak coherently to each
other. These are more urgent since the shift from an art history
centered on the western tradition to one that is consciously
global.
During the Principate (roughly 27 BCE to 235 CE), when the empire
reached its maximum extent, Roman society and culture were
radically transformed. But how was the vast territory of the empire
controlled? Did the demands of central government stimulate
economic growth or endanger survival? What forces of cohesion
operated to balance the social and economic inequalities and high
mortality rates? How did the official religion react in the face of
the diffusion of alien cults and the emergence of Christianity?
These are some of the many questions posed here, in the new,
expanded edition of Garnsey and Saller's pathbreaking account of
the economy, society, and culture of the Roman Empire. This second
edition includes a new introduction that explores the consequences
for government and the governing classes of the replacement of the
Republic by the rule of emperors. Addenda to the original chapters
offer up-to-date discussions of issues and point to new evidence
and approaches that have enlivened the study of Roman history in
recent decades. A completely new chapter assesses how far Rome's
subjects resisted her hegemony. The bibliography has also been
thoroughly updated, and a new color plate section has been added.
This volumepresents acollection of essays on different aspects of
Roman sarcophagi. These varied approaches will produce fresh
insights into a subject which is receiving increased interest in
English-language scholarship, with a new awareness of the important
contribution that sarcophagi can make to the study of the social
use and production of Roman art. The book will therefore be a
timely addition to existing literature. Metropolitan sarcophagi are
the main focus of the volume, which will cover a wide time range
from the first century AD to post classical periods (including
early Christian sarcophagi and post-classical reception). Other
papers will look at aspects of viewing and representation,
iconography, and marble analysis. There will be an Introduction
written by the co-editors.
This volume presents a collection of essays on different aspects of
Roman sarcophagi. These varied approaches will produce fresh
insights into a subject which is receiving increased interest in
English-language scholarship, with a new awareness of the important
contribution that sarcophagi can make to the study of the social
use and production of Roman art. The book will therefore be a
timely addition to existing literature. Metropolitan sarcophagi are
the main focus of the volume, which will cover a wide time range
from the first century AD to post classical periods (including
early Christian sarcophagi and post-classical reception). Other
papers will look at aspects of viewing and representation,
iconography, and marble analysis. There will be an Introduction
written by the co-editors.
Featuring some of the major voices in the world of art history,
this volume explores the methodological aspects of comparison in
the historiography of the discipline. The chapters assess the
strengths and weaknesses of comparative practice in the history of
art, and consider the larger issue of the place of comparative in
how art history may develop in the future. The contributors
represent a comprehensive range of period and geographic command
from antiquity to modernity, from China and Islam to Europe, from
various forms of art history to archaeology, anthropology and
material culture studies. Art history is less a single discipline
than a series of divergent scholarly fields - in very different
historical, geographic and cultural contexts - but all with a
visual emphasis on the close examination of objects. These fields
focus on different, often incompatible temporal and cultural
contexts, yet nonetheless they regard themselves as one coherent
discipline - namely the history of art. There are substantive
problems in how the sub-fields within the broad-brush
generalization called 'art history' can speak coherently to each
other. These are more urgent since the shift from an art history
centered on the western tradition to one that is consciously
global.
The passage from Imperial Rome to the era of late antiquity, when
the Roman Empire underwent a religious conversion to Christianity,
saw some of the most significant and innovative developments in
Western culture. This stimulating book investigates the role of the
visual arts, the great diversity of paintings, statues, luxury
arts, and masonry, as both reflections and agents of those changes.
Jas' Elsner's ground-breaking account discusses both Roman and
early Christian art 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, he presents a fresh and challenging
interpretation of an extraordinarily rich cultural crucible in
which many fundamental developments of later European art had their
origins. This second edition includes a new discussion of the
Eurasian context of Roman art, an updated bibliography, and new,
full colour illustrations.
This book reveals the rewards of exploring the relationship between
art and religion in the first millennium, and the particular
problems of comparing the visual cultures of different emergent and
established religions of the period in Eurasia - Buddhism,
Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Islam, Judaism, Christianity and the
pagan religions of the Roman world. Most of these became
established and remained in play as what are called 'the world
religions'. The chapters in this volume show how the long
traditions of studying these topics are caught up in complex local,
ancestral, colonial and post-colonial discourses and biases, which
have made comparison difficult. The study of Late Antiquity turns
out also to be an examination of the intellectual histories of
modernity.
This book explores the many strategies by which elite Greeks and
Romans resisted the cultural and political hegemony of the Roman
Empire in ways that avoided direct confrontation or simple warfare.
By resistance is meant a range of responses including 'opposition',
'subversion', 'antagonism', 'dissent', and 'criticism' within a
multiplicity of cultural forms from identity-assertion to polemic.
Although largely focused on literary culture, its implications can
be extended to the world of visual and material culture. Within the
volume a distinguished group of scholars explores topics such as
the affirmation of identity via language choice in epigraphy; the
use of genre (dialogue, declamation, biography, the novel) to
express resistant positions; identity negotiation in the
scintillating and often satirical Greek essays of Lucian; and the
place of religion in resisting hegemonic power.
The Roman Empire during the reigns of Septimius Severus and his
successors (AD 193-225) enjoyed a remarkably rich and dynamic
cultural life. It saw the consolidation of the movement known as
the second sophistic, which had flourished during the second
century and promoted the investigation and reassessment of
classical Greek culture. It also witnessed the emergence of
Christianity on its own terms, in Greek and in Latin, as a major
force extending its influence across literature, philosophy,
theology, art and even architecture. This volume offers the first
wide-ranging and authoritative survey of the culture of this
fascinating period when the background of Rome's rulers was for the
first time non-Italian. Leading scholars discuss general trends and
specific instances, together producing a vibrant picture of an
extraordinary period of cultural innovation rooted in ancient
tradition.
Rhetoric was fundamental to education and to cultural aspiration in
the Greek and Roman worlds. It was one of the key aspects of
antiquity that slipped under the line between the ancient world and
Christianity erected by the early Church in late antiquity. Ancient
rhetorical theory is obsessed with examples and discussions drawn
from visual material. This book mines this rich seam of theoretical
analysis from within Roman culture to present an internalist model
for some aspects of how the Romans understood, made and appreciated
their art. The understanding of public monuments like the Arch of
Titus or Trajan's Column or of imperial statuary, domestic wall
painting, funerary altars and sarcophagi, as well as of intimate
items like children's dolls, is greatly enriched by being placed in
relevant rhetorical contexts created by the Roman world.
A remarkable collection of Tibetan religious verse--of interest to
students of any spiritual tradition.
The first major anthology of Tibetan spiritual poetry available in
the West, "Songs of Spiritual Experience" offers original
translations of fifty-two poems from all the traditions and schools
of Tibetan Buddhism, spanning the eleventh to the twentieth
centuries. These poems communicate spiritual insight with grace and
precision, addressing the themes of impermanence, solitude, guru
devotion, emptiness, mystic consciousness, and the path of
awakening. Also included here is a thorough introduction exploring
the characteristics of Tibetan verse and its role in Buddhism and a
glossary containing notes on the poems.
Landscape has been a key theme in world archaeology and
trans-cultural art history over the last half century, particularly
in the study of painting in art history and in all questions of
human intervention and the placement of monuments in the natural
world within archaeology. However, the representation of landscape
has been rather less addressed in the scholarship of the
archaeologically-accessed visual cultures of the ancient world. The
kinds of reliefs, objects, and paintings discussed here have a
significant purchase on matters concerned with landscape and space
in the visual sphere, but were discovered within archaeological
contexts and by means of excavation. Through case studies focused
on the invention of wilderness imagery in ancient China, the
relation of monuments to landscape in ancient Greece, the place of
landscape painting in Mesoamerican Maya art, and the construction
of sacred landscape across Eurasia between Stonehenge and the Silk
Road via Pompeii, this book emphasises the importance of thinking
about models of landscape in ancient art, as well as the value of
comparative approaches in underlining core aspects of the topic.
Notably, it explores questions of space, both actual and
conceptual, including how space is configured through form and
representation.
This is the first volume of collected papers to be devoted to the
work of Philostratus, the great essayist, biographer and historian
of Greek culture in the Roman world, and the most scintillating
writer of Greek prose in the third century AD. The papers cover his
remarkable range, from hagiographic fiction to historical dialogue,
from pictorial description to love letters, and from prescriptions
for gymnastics to the lives of the Sophists. The quality of his
writing and the concerns within his purview - religion, aesthetics,
athletics and education - make Philostratus's writings among the
most important documents for understanding Greek culture in the
Roman world, and guide us in exploring the maturity of Hellenic
cultural identity in the context of the rise of Christianity. Few
studies have been devoted to this neglected figure, and this
collection will therefore be of great value to scholars and
students of imperial Greek literature and art.
Religion has always been a fundamental force for constructing
identity, from antiquity to the contemporary world. The
transformation of ancient cults into faith systems, which we
recognise now as major world religions, took place in the first
millennium AD, in the period we call 'Late Antiquity'. Our argument
is that the creative impetus for both the emergence, and much of
the visual distinctiveness of the world religions came in contexts
of cultural encounter. Bridging the traditional divide between
classical, Asian, Islamic and Western history, this exhibition and
its accompanying catalogue highlights religious and artistic
creativity at points of contact and cultural borders between late
antique civilisations. This catalogue features the creation of
specific visual languages that belong to five major world
religions: Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam. The
imagery still used by these belief systems today is evidence for
the development of distinct religious identities in Late Antiquity.
Emblematic visual forms like the figure of Buddha and Christ, or
Islamic aniconism, only evolved in dialogue with a variety of
coexisting visualisations of the sacred. As late antique believers
appropriated some competing models and rejected others, they
created compelling and long-lived representations of faith, but
also revealed their indebtedness to a multitude of contemporaneous
religious ideas and images.
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Images of Mithra (Hardcover)
Philippa Adrych, Robert Bracey, Dominic Dalglish, Stefanie Lenk, Rachel Wood; Edited by …
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R2,036
Discovery Miles 20 360
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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With a history of use extending back to Vedic texts of the second
millennium BC, derivations of the name Mithra appear in the Roman
Empire, across Sasanian Persia, and in the Kushan Empire of
southern Afghanistan and northern India during the first millennium
AD. Even today, this name has a place in Yazidi and Zoroastrian
religion. But what connection have Mihr in Persia, Miiro in Kushan
Bactria, and Mithras in the Roman Empire to one another? Over the
course of the volume, specialists in the material culture of these
diverse regions explore appearances of the name Mithra from six
distinct locations in antiquity. In a subversion of the usual
historical process, the authors begin not from an assessment of
texts, but by placing images of Mithra at the heart of their
analysis. Careful consideration of each example's own context,
situating it in the broader scheme of religious traditions and
on-going cultural interactions, is key to this discussion. Such an
approach opens up a host of potential comparisons and
interpretations that are often side-lined in historical accounts.
What Images of Mithra offers is a fresh approach to the ways in
which gods were labelled and depicted in the ancient world. Through
an emphasis on material culture, a more nuanced understanding of
the processes of religious formation is proposed in what is but the
first part of the Visual Conversations series.
The aesthetic changes in late Roman literature speak to the
foundations of modern Western culture. The dawn of a modern way of
being in the world, one that most Europeans and Americans would
recognize as closely ancestral to their own, is to be found not in
the distant antiquity of Greece nor in the golden age of a Roman
empire that spanned the Mediterranean, but more fundamentally in
the original and problematic fusion of Greco-Roman culture with a
new and unexpected foreign element-the arrival of Christianity as
an exclusive state religion. For a host of reasons, traditionalist
scholarship has failed to give a full and positive account of the
formal, aesthetic and religious transformations of ancient poetics
in Late Antiquity. The Poetics of Late Latin Literature attempts to
capture the excitement and vibrancy of the living ancient tradition
reinventing itself in a new context in the hands of a series of
great Latin writers mainly from the fourth and fifth centuries AD.
A series of the most distinguished expert voices in later Latin
poetry as well as some of the most exciting new scholars have been
specially commissioned to write new papers for this volume.
This is the first volume of collected papers to be devoted to the
work of Philostratus, the great essayist, biographer and historian
of Greek culture in the Roman world, and the most scintillating
writer of Greek prose in the third century AD. The papers cover his
remarkable range, from hagiographic fiction to historical dialogue,
from pictorial description to love letters, and from prescriptions
for gymnastics to the lives of the Sophists. The quality of his
writing and the concerns within his purview - religion, aesthetics,
athletics and education - make Philostratus's writings among the
most important documents for understanding Greek culture in the
Roman world, and guide us in exploring the maturity of Hellenic
cultural identity in the context of the rise of Christianity. Few
studies have been devoted to this neglected figure, and this
collection will therefore be of great value to scholars and
students of imperial Greek literature and art.
This book presents a range of case-studies of pilgrimage in
Graeco-Roman antiquity, drawing on a wide variety of evidence. It
rejects the usual reluctance to accept the category of pilgrimage
in pagan polytheism and affirms the significance of sacred mobility
not only as an important factor in understanding ancient religion
and its topographies but also as vitally ancestral to later
Christian practice.
Athenian tragedy of the fifth century BCE became an international
and a canonical genre with remarkable rapidity. It is, therefore, a
remarkable test case through which to explore how a genre becomes
privileged and what the cultural effects of its continuing
appropriation are. In this collection of essays by an international
group of distinguished scholars the particular point of reference
is the visual, that is, the myriad ways in which tragic texts are
(re)interpreted, (re)appropriated, and (re)visualized through
verbal and artistic description. Topics treated include the
interaction of comedy and dithyramb with tragedy; vase painting and
tragedy; representations of Dionysus, of Tragoedia, and of Nike;
Homer, Aeschylus, Philostratus, and Longus; choral lyric and ritual
performance, choral victories, and the staging of choruses on the
modern stage. The common focus of all the essays is an engagement
with and response to the unique scholarly voice of Froma Zeitlin.
Polemon of Laodicea (near modern Denizli, south-west Turkey) was a
wealthy Greek aristocrat and a key member of the intellectual
movement known as the Second Sophistic. Among his works was the
Physiognomy, a manual on how to tell character from appearance,
thus enabling its readers to choose friends and avoid enemies on
sight. Its formula of detailed instruction and personal
reminiscence proved so successful that the book was re-edited in
the fourth century by Adamantius in Greek, translated and adapted
by an unknown Latin author of the same era, and translated in the
early Middle Ages into Syriac and Arabic. The surviving versions of
Adamantius, Anonymus Latinus, and the Leiden Arabic more than make
up for the loss of the original.
The present volume is the work of a team of leading Classicists
and Arabists. The main surviving versions in Greek and Latin are
translated into English for the first time. The Leiden Arabic
translation is authoritatively re-edited and translated, as is a
sample of the alternative Arabic Polemon. The texts and
translations are introduced by a series of masterly studies that
tell the story of the origins, function, and legacy of Polemon's
work, a legacy especially rich in Islam. The story of the
Physiognomy is the story of how one man's obsession with
identifying enemies came to be taken up in the fascinating
transmission of Greek thought into Arabic.
This book, first published in 2004, 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 history of Roman
art traditionally followed the model of a sequence of stylistic
phases affecting the works of their era in the manner of a uniform
Zeitgeist. By contrast, 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.
This book, first published in 2004, 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 history of Roman
art traditionally followed the model of a sequence of stylistic
phases affecting the works of their era in the manner of a uniform
Zeitgeist. By contrast, 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.
Pausanias, the Greek historian and traveler, lived and wrote around the second century AD, during the period when Greece had fallen peacefully to the Roman Empire. While fragments from this period abound, Pausanias' Periegesis ("description") of Greece is the only fully preserved text of travel writing to have survived. This collection uses Pausanias as a multifaceted lens yielding indispensable information about the cultural world of Roman Greece.
This book presents a range of case-studies of pilgrimage in
Graeco-Roman antiquity, drawing on a wide variety of evidence. It
rejects the usual reluctance to accept the category of pilgrimage
in pagan polytheism and affirms the significance of sacred mobility
not only as an important factor in understanding ancient religion
and its topographies but also as vitally ancestral to later
Christian practice.
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Nadine Gordimer
Paperback
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R398
R330
Discovery Miles 3 300
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