This is the first full study of Roman strigillated sarcophagi, which are the largest group of decorated marble sarcophagi to survive in the city of Rome. Characterized by panels of carved fluting - hence the description 'strigillated', after the curved strigil used by Roman bathers to scrape off oil - and limited figure scenes, they were produced from the mid-second to the early fifth century AD, and thus cover a critical period in Rome, from empire to early Christianity. Roman Strigillated Sarcophagi focuses on their rich potential as an historical source for exploring the social and cultural life of the city in the later empire. The first part of the volume examines aspects of their manufacture, use, and viewing, emphasizing distinctive features. The second part looks at the figured representations carved on the sarcophagi, and at their social significance and creativity, concentrating on how their various arrangements allowed viewers to develop their own interpretations. The subjects represented by the figures and the flexibility with which they might be read, provide invaluable insights into how Romans thought about life and death during these changing times. The final part of the volume surveys how later societies responded to Roman strigillated sarcophagi. From as early as the fifth century AD their distinctive decoration and allusions to the Roman past made them especially attractive for reuse in particular contemporary contexts, notably for elite burials and the decoration of prominent buildings. The motif of curved fluting was also adopted and adapted: it decorated neo-classical memorials to Captain Cook, Napoleon's sister-in-law Christine Boyer, and Penelope Boothby, and its use continues into this century, well over one and a half millennia since it first decorated Roman sarcophagi.

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.

The volume presents essays on different aspects of Roman sarcophagi. These varied approaches produce freshinsights into a subject which has received 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. 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.

This is the first major study of the themes used in the decoration of sarcophagi made for children in Rome and Ostia from the late first to early fourth century AD. Using the subject categories adopted by other recent books on Roman Sarcophagi, Huskinson catalogs examples of each type, and discusses how these fit into the general pattern. Huskinson also discerns the differing themes that resulted from pagan and Christian attitudes towards children and beliefs about life and death.

This book explores the disappearance of Greek mythic imagery from the Roman sarcophagi in the 3rd Century.

Demonstrates the central significance of rhetoric in ancient responses to and receptions of Roman art.

Explores four key questions around Roman funerary customs that change our view of the society and its values.

Over fourteen expeditions I drove a hundred thousand miles across four continents searching out churches, cathedrals, baptistries, catacombs, archeological sites, art galleries, antiquities museums, necropoleis, classical gardens, castles, fortresses, palaces, and private homes--any place that had a Roman Empire era stone sarcophagus. Beside the work of locating and cataloguing sarcophagi, the project I set for myself twenty years ago, I composed explanatory material to say how I did my work, noted what was to be found sculpted on sarcophagi, and developed a schema for organizing the various visual characteristics found on sarcophagi. On the model of outsider art, my work is outsider scholarshipyet here is documentation of 1,932 presently existing Roman Empire sarcophagi.

The use of stone in vast quantities is a ubiquitous and defining feature of the material culture of the Roman world. In this volume, Russell provides a new and wide-ranging examination of the production, distribution, and use of carved stone objects throughout the Roman world, including how enormous quantities of high-quality white and polychrome marbles were moved all around the Mediterranean to meet the demand for exotic material. The long-distance supply of materials for artistic and architectural production, not to mention the trade in finished objects like statues and sarcophagi, is one of the most remarkable features of the Roman world. Despite this, it has never received much attention in mainstream economic studies. Focusing on the market for stone and its supply, the administration, distribution, and chronology of quarrying, and the practicalities of stone transport, Russell offers a detailed assessment of the Roman stone trade and how the relationship between producer and customer functioned even over considerable distances.

A strange thing happened to Roman sarcophagi in the third century: their Greek mythic imagery vanished. Since the beginning of their production a century earlier, these beautifully carved coffins had featured bold mythological scenes. How do we make sense of this imagery's own death on later sarcophagi, when mythological narratives were truncated, gods and heroes were excised, and genres featuring no mythic content whatsoever came to the fore? What is the significance of such a profound tectonic shift in the Roman funerary imagination for our understanding of Roman history and culture, for the development of its arts, for the passage from the High to the Late Empire and the coming of Christianity, but above all, for the individual Roman women and men who chose this imagery, and who took it with them to the grave? In this book, Mont Allen offers the clues that aid in resolving this mystery.