An expansive look at ancient art and architecture over four centuries highlighting the diversity of makers and viewers within and beyond Rome’s ever-changing political boundaries   Roman art and architecture is typically understood as being bound in some ways to a political event or as a series of aesthetic choices and experiences stemming from a center in Rome itself. Moving beyond the misleading catchall label “Roman,� John North Hopkins aims to untangle the many peoples whose diverse cultures and traditions contributed to Rome’s visual culture over a four-hundred-year time span across the first millennium BCE.   Hopkins carefully reconsiders some of the period’s most iconic works by way of the many practices and peoples bound up with them. Some of these include the extraordinary and complex effort to build the Temple of Jupiter; the creative actions and diverse encounters tied to luxury objects like the Ficoroni Cista; and the important meanings held by sacred temple sculpture and votive offerings through their making and subsequent practices of devotion.   A key purpose of this book is to question an idea of Rome that has focused on elite production and the textual record; Hopkins instead calls attention to the lesser-known—often silenced—actors who were integral players. The result is a deep understanding of a diverse and historically rich Italic and Mediterranean world, as well as the myriad cultures, communities, and individuals who would have made and experienced art within and around the changing political boundaries of Rome.

An important new look at Rome's earliest buildings and their context within the broader tradition of Mediterranean culture This groundbreaking study traces the development of Roman architecture and its sculpture from the earliest days to the middle of the 5th century BCE. Existing narratives cast the Greeks as the progenitors of classical art and architecture or rely on historical sources dating centuries after the fact to establish the Roman context. Author John North Hopkins, however, allows the material and visual record to play the primary role in telling the story of Rome's origins, synthesizing important new evidence from recent excavations. Hopkins's detailed account of urban growth and artistic, political, and social exchange establishes strong parallels with communities across the Mediterranean. From the late 7th century, Romans looked to increasingly distant lands for shifts in artistic production. By the end of the archaic period they were building temples that would outstrip the monumentality of even those on the Greek mainland. The book's extensive illustrations feature new reconstructions, allowing readers a rare visual exploration of this fragmentary evidence.

A revealing look at ancient art in the Menil Collection that addresses the problem of objects lacking archaeological context This innovative presentation of ancient objects in the Menil Collection offers a new model for understanding works from antiquity that lack archaeological context. Editors John North Hopkins, Sarah Kielt Costello, and Paul R. Davis with 11 additional authors employ a creative mixture of iconography, technical studies, and known provenance to gain insight into both the meaning of the objects themselves and what they can teach us more broadly about archaeology, art history, and collecting practices. As they take on complex issues of cultural heritage, legality, and taste, these essays bring to life works that are often consigned to either the imperial past or conceptual limbo and introduce a fresh framework through which to engage with the multilayered history that these objects represent.