Visual culture was an essential part of ancient social, religious, and political life. Appearance and experience of beings and things was of paramount importance. In Visual Power in Ancient Greece and Rome, Tonio Hölscher explores the fundamental phenomena of Greek and Roman visual culture and their enormous impact on the ancient world, considering memory over time, personal appearance, conceptualization and representation of reality, and significant decoration as fundamental categories of art as well as of social practice. With an emphasis on public spaces such as sanctuaries, agora and forum, Hölscher investigates the ways in which these spaces were used, viewed, and experienced in religious rituals, political manifestations, and social interaction.

The study of Greco-Roman civilisation is as exciting and innovative today as it has ever been. This intriguing collection of essays by contemporary classicists reveals new discoveries, new interpretations and new ways of exploring the experiences of the ancient world. Through one and a half millennia of literature, politics, philosophy, law, religion and art, the classical world formed the origin of western culture and thought. This book emphasises the many ways in which it continues to engage with contemporary life. Offering a wide variety of authorial style, the chapters range in subject matter from contemporary poets' exploitation of Greek and Latin authors, via newly discovered literary texts and art works, to modern arguments about ancient democracy and slavery, and close readings of the great poets and philosophers of antiquity. This engaging book reflects the current rejuvenation of classical studies and will fascinate anyone with an interest in western history.

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.

This book, first published in 2004, develops a theoretical concept for understanding the Roman art of images.

In The Greek and Roman Trophy: From Battlefield Marker to Icon of Power, Kinnee presents the first monographic treatment of ancient trophies in sixty years. The study spans Archaic Greece through the Augustan Principate. Kinnee aims to create a holistic view of this complex monument-type by breaking down boundaries between the study of art history, philology, the history of warfare, and the anthropology of religion and magic. Ultimately, the kaleidoscopic picture that emerges is of an ad hoc anthropomorphic Greek talisman that gradually developed into a sophisticated, Augustan sculptural or architectural statement of power. The former, a product of the hoplite phalanx, disappeared from battlefields as the Macedonian cavalry grew in importance, shifting instead onto coins and into rhetoric, where it became a statement of military might. For their part, the Romans seem to have encountered the trophy as an icon on Syracusan coinage. Recognizing its value as a statement of territorial ownership, the Romans spent two centuries honing the trophy-concept into an empire-building tool, planted at key locations around the Mediterranean to assert Roman presence and dominance. This volume covers a ubiquitous but poorly understood phenomenon and will therefore be instructive to upper-level undergraduates, graduate students, and scholars in all fields of Classical Studies.

The body was central to the visual culture of ancient Greece, reflecting an obsession with physical beauty, integrity, dynamism, and power. In this penetrating study, Andrew Stewart analyses the problem of the Greeks' strange preoccupation with nakedness and sketches how artworks filter our understanding of the subject. Exploring selected constructions of gender, ranging from the men of the Parthenon frieze to naked girls on Spartan hand-mirrors, Stewart investigates the Greek body as a microcosm of society, focusing upon figurations of the Athenian body politic; erotica for men and women; and selected representations of the Other, such as Gorgons, Satyrs, Centaurs, and Amazons. A cultural, theoretical and sociological study of this seminal topic, Stewart's analysis offers new insights into the society and mentality of the ancient Greeks.

By offering fluent, accurate translations of extracts and fragments from a wide assortment of ancient texts, this volume allows a comprehensive overview of ancient Greek and Roman concepts of otherness, as well as Greek and Roman views of non-Greeks and non-Romans. A general introduction, thorough annotation, maps, a select bibliography, and an index are also included.

Arguing that the scholarship on this topic has not appreciated Roman values in the visual arts, this book examines Roman strategies for the appropriation of the Greek visual culture. A knowledge of Roman values explains the entire range of visual appropriation in Roman art, which includes not only the phenomenon of copying, but also such manifestations as allusion, parody, and, most importantly, aemulatio, successful rivalry with one's models.

Addresses the 'Classical Revolution' in Greek art, its contexts, aims, achievements, and impact.

The polytheistic religious systems of ancient Greece and Rome reveal an imaginative attitude towards the construction of the divine. One of the most important instruments in this process was certainly the visualisation. Images of the gods transformed the divine world into a visually experienceable entity, comprehensible even without a theoretical or theological superstructure. For the illiterates, images were together with oral traditions and rituals the only possibility to approach the idea of the divine; for the intellectuals, images of the gods could be allegorically transcended symbols to reflect upon. Based on the art historical and textual evidence, this volume offers a fresh view on the historical, literary, and artistic significance of divine images as powerful visual media of religious and intellectual communication.