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.

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.

Russell provides an examination of the production, distribution, and use of carved stone objects in the Roman world. Focusing on the market for stone and its supply, he offers an assessment of the practicalities of stone transport and how the relationship between producer and customer functioned even over considerable distances.

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 comprehensive inventory of all known sarcophagi from the Jewish catacombs of Rome, is the first specialized treatment of this subject in monograph form. It describes and analyses each sarcophagus and provides full reference material which it critically examines. This work thus fills a lacuna in the literature on this field, which has up to now been confined to the treatment of early Christian and pagan sarcophagi of the period. �We have here a complete overview of the Jewish sarcophagi of ancient Rome, all of them illustrated by photographs and provided with extensive bibliographies. This work thus fills a lacuna in the literature on this field.� Journal for the Study of Judaism �Until this book, however, no one has attempted to assemble all of the Jewish sarcophagi separately in one place and to provide relevant information in the form of a well-ordered catalogue. For this reason, Konikoff's book provides a welcome resource for anyone interested in the material evidence of ancient Judaism and forms a good beginning for study of the sarcophagi, especially from a bibliographic point of view.� Gnomon .

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.

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

Samuel Rocca, born in 1968, earned his PhD in 2006. Since 2000, he worked as a college and high school teacher at The Neri Bloomfield College of Design & Teacher Training, Haifa; at the Talpiot College, Tel Aviv since 2005, and at the Faculty of Architecture at the Judaea and Samaria College, Ariel since 2006.

Figural and non-figural supports are a ubiquitous feature of Roman marble sculpture; they appear in sculptures ranging in size from miniature to colossal and of all levels of quality. At odds with modern ideas about beauty, completeness, and visual congruence, these elements, especially non-figural struts, have been dismissed by scholars as mere safeguards for production and transport. However, close examination of these features reveals the tastes and expectations of those who commissioned, bought, and displayed marble sculptures throughout the Mediterranean in the Hellenistic and Roman periods. Drawing on a large body of examples, Greek and Latin literary sources, and modern theories of visual culture, this study constitutes the first comprehensive investigation of non-figural supports in Roman sculpture. The book overturns previous conceptions of Roman visual values and traditions and challenges our understanding of the Roman reception of Greek art.