Bøger i Oxford Studies in Ancient Culture Representation serien

This important new study looks at coffins, masks, shrouds, and tombs from the Roman Period in Egypt, when naturalistic Greek art forms, like portraits, were combined with traditional Egyptian art. The book presents more than 150 objects and tombs, many for the first time, and reveals how they created a 'beautiful burial' to glorify the dead in the changing cultural landscape of Roman Egypt.

Through both textual and iconographic sources, this book examines the representations of the body in Greek Old and Middle Comedy, how it was staged, perceived, and imagined, particularly in Athens, Magna Graecia, and Sicily.

A study on the intersection of art, science, and the natural world in Hellenistic and Roman times.

Challenging the idea that heritage is a purely modern phenomenon, this volume addresses how historic buildings were treated in Imperial Rome, examining the way in which the ancients restored the monuments they inherited from earlier generations and developing our understanding of the Roman concept of built heritage.

Through a study of tombs and burial customs in Rome and its surroundings, this volume demonstrates that the third century was an exciting period of experimentation and creativity, and that ambition continued to be a driving force in all social classes, who paved the way for the new system of late antiquity.

Emperors and Ancestors analyses the different ways in which imperial lineage was represented, looking at the various 'media' through which images of emperors could be transmitted, such as coinage, inscriptions, sculpture, architecture, and literary text.

A fully illustrated study of healing pilgrimage in the Roman empire during the second century AD. The focus is upon one particular pilgrim, the famous orator Aelius Aristides, whose Sacred Tales is examined in the context of the sanctuary of Asklepios at Pergamon, where the author spent two years in search of healing.

The Greeks' fascination with athletics in the gymnasium and festivals, such as the Olympic Games is well known. This book looks at the art associated with Greek athletics to see what it meant to both Greeks and Romans during the period of the Roman Empire. It argues that athletics continued to act as a crucial sign of Greek identity.

Nude statues of Roman emperors, generals, businessmen, and their wives survive from the ancient world in large numbers. This book explores the reasons why so many Romans chose to have themselves represented naked, and what this choice may tell us about Roman attitudes towards the self, the body, and personal identity.

An illustrated study of the Roman triumphal procession which asks the questions: What was displayed? How was it paraded? What was the response? Ida Ostenberg analyses the stories the Roman triumph told about the defeated and the ideas it transmitted about Rome itself.

This book combines archaeology and epigraphy to discuss portraits in ancient art within the context of city-states honouring individuals through erecting statues, and families imitating this practice. This tells us a lot about the history of these cities and how ancient art worked as a construction of relations during the Hellenistic period.

This volume considers the phenomenon of mimetic contagion, whereby works of art draw viewers into direct imitation of themselves, and how it operates within specific historical contexts. Terence's Eunuch is used as a case study, situating the motif within the peculiarities of mid-second-century BC Rome and its anxieties about the power of art.

This study explores Roman luxury villa lifestyle and architecture to shed light on the villas' design as a dynamic process related to cultural, social, and environmental factors. Through an analysis of five villas from around the bay of Naples, it shows how the Romans developed a sophisticated interplay between architecture and landscape.

An archaeological and art-historical study of the images and monuments of Roman 'client' kings in the Near East from the Taurus to Edom during the transitional period between 100 BC and AD 100. Kropp treats images and monuments as historical documents and aims at uncovering royal identities and ideological aspirations.

Gaifman explores the phenomenon aniconism - the adoption of aniconic monuments, objects such as pillars and poles, to designate the presence of the divine. Shifting our attention from the well-known territories of Greek anthropomorphism and naturalism, it casts new light on the realm of non-figural objects in Greek religious art.

Ancient Rome as a Museum considers how cultural objects from the Roman Empire came to reflect, construct, and challenge Roman perceptions of power and identity. Rutledge argues that Roman cultural values are indicated in part by what sort of materials Romans deemed worthy of display and how they chose to display, view, and preserve them.

This richly illustrated volume brings together a wide range of Hellenistic art objects, and reveals how ancient social attitudes were encoded in the body language of their subjects.

One of the earliest surviving examples of 'art history', Pliny the Elder's 'chapters on art' form part of his encyclopaedic Natural History, completed shortly before its author died during the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79. This important new work reassesses Pliny's discussion of art, revealing how art is used to expound the Roman imperial agenda which dominates the work as a whole.

Statues were everywhere in the Roman world. They served as objects of cult, honours to emperors and noblemen, and memorials to the dead. Combining close attention to individual Roman texts and images with an unprecedented broad perspective on this remarkable phenomenon, Statues in Roman Society explains the impact which all kinds of statuary had on the ancient population.

Drawing on evidence from archaeology, art history, and textual sources to contextualize Greco-Scythian metalwork in ancient society, Meyer offers unique introductions to the archaeology of Scythia and its ties to Asia and classical Greece, modern museum and visual culture studies, and the intellectual history of classics in Russia and the West.