The frames of classical art are often seen as marginal to the images that they surround. Traditional art history has tended to view framing devices as supplementary 'ornaments'. Likewise, classical archaeologists have often treated them as tools for taxonomic analysis. This book not only argues for the integral role of framing within Graeco-Roman art, but also explores the relationship between the frames of classical antiquity and those of more modern art and aesthetics. Contributors combine close formal analysis with more theoretical approaches: chapters examine framing devices across multiple media (including vase and fresco painting, relief and free-standing sculpture, mosaics, manuscripts and inscriptions), structuring analysis around the themes of 'framing pictorial space', 'framing bodies', 'framing the sacred' and 'framing texts'. The result is a new cultural history of framing - one that probes the sophisticated and playful ways in which frames could support, delimit, shape and even interrogate the images contained within.

Frame Work explores how framing devices in the art of Renaissance Italy respond, and appeal, to viewers in their social, religious, and political context.

"delightful, readable, and scholarly. The volume is profusely and well illustrated, each art example is clearly labelled and dated, and superb supplementary references for illustrations and supplementary suggestions for further reading are added to complete the study." Choice

This book investigates the nature of aesthetic experience with the help of ancient material, exploring our responses to both narratives and images.

Demonstrates how ancient Roman mural paintings stood at the intersection of contemporary social, ethical, and aesthetic concerns.

The proem to Herodotus's history of the Greek-Persian wars relates the long-standing conflict between Europe and Asia from the points of view of the Greeks' chief antagonists, the Persians and Phoenicians. However humorous or fantastical these accounts may be, their stories, as voiced by a Greek, reveal a great deal about the perceived differences between Greeks and others. The conflict is framed in political, not absolute, terms correlative to historical events, not in terms of innate qualities of the participants. Becky Martin reconsiders works of art produced by, or thought to be produced by, Greeks and Phoenicians during the first millennium B.C., when they were in prolonged contact with one another. Although primordial narratives that emphasize an essential quality of Greek and Phoenician identities have been critiqued for decades, Martin contends that the study of ancient history has not yet effectively challenged the idea of the inevitability of the political and cultural triumph of Greece. She aims to show how the methods used to study ancient history shape perceptions of it and argues that art is especially positioned to revise conventional accountings of the history of Greek-Phoenician interaction. Examining Athenian and Tyrian coins, kouros statues and wall mosaics, as well as the familiar Alexander Sarcophagus and the sculpture known as the "Slipper Slapper, " Martin questions what constituted "Greek" and "Phoenician" art and, by extension, Greek and Phoenician identity.

In a book that draws attention to some of our most familiar and unquestioned habits of thought—from "framing" to "perspective" to "reflection"—Rayna Kalas suggests that metaphors of the poetic imagination were once distinctly material and technical in character. Kalas explores the visual culture of the English Renaissance by way of the poetic image, showing that English writers avoided charges of idolatry and fancy through conceits that were visual, but not pictorial. Frames, mirrors, and windows have been pervasive and enduring metaphors for texts from classical antiquity to modernity; as a result, those metaphors seem universally to emphasize the mimetic function of language, dividing reality from the text that represents it. This book dissociates those metaphors from their earlier and later formulations in order to demonstrate that figurative language was material in translating signs and images out of a sacred and iconic context and into an aesthetic and representational one. Reading specific poetic images—in works by Spenser, Shakespeare, Gascoigne, Bacon, and Nashe—together with material innovations in frames and glass, Kalas reveals both the immanence and the agency of figurative language in the early modern period. Frame, Glass, Verse shows, finally, how this earlier understanding of poetic language has been obscured by a modern idea of framing that has structured our apprehension of works of art, concepts, and even historical periods. Kalas presents archival research in the history of frames, mirrors, windows, lenses, and reliquaries that will be of interest to art historians, cultural theorists, historians of science, and literary critics alike. Throughout Frame, Glass, Verse, she challenges readers to rethink the relationship of poetry to technology.

The book is a comprehensive phenomenological study of meanings that are unique to the major visual art forms.

Includes Europe and the United States, from the Middle Ages to the present.

A complete introduction to the rich cultural legacy of Rome through the study of Roman art ... It includes a discussion of the relevance of Rome to the modern world, a short historical overview, and descriptions of forty-five works of art in the Roman collection organized in three thematic sections: Power and Authority in Roman Portraiture; Myth, Religion, and the Afterlife; and Daily Life in Ancient Rome. This resource also provides lesson plans and classroom activities."--Publisher website.