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189 results in Classical art and architecture

Page 1 of 10

The Afterlife of the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus
  • Re-conceiving an Ancient Wonder in Early Modern Europe
  • Edited by Desmond Bryan Kraege, Felix Martin
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    July 2026
    Print publication:
    31 July 2026
  • Few buildings have been as important to Western culture as the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus. One of the Seven Wonders of antiquity, it was destroyed during the Middle Ages, leading countless architects, antiquarians, painters and printmakers in Early Modern Europe to speculate upon its appearance. This book – the first on its subject – examines their works, from erudite publications to simple pen sketches, from elegant watercolours to complete buildings inspired by the monument. Spanning the period between the Italian Renaissance and the discovery and archaeological excavation of the Mausoleum's foundations in the 1850s, it covers the most important cultural contexts of Western Europe, without neglecting artworks from Peru, China and Japan. The monument's connexion with themes of widowhood and female political power are analysed, as are the manifold interactions between architecture, text and image in the afterlife of the Mausoleum. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Bronze Sculpture in the Classical World
  • From Text to Context to Technology
  • Carol C. Mattusch
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    April 2026
    Print publication:
    30 April 2026
  • Bronze was a prized medium for sculpture in the classical world, as reflected by the remnants of the thousands of bronze statues of gods, dignitaries, and intellectuals that once filled its cities and sanctuaries. Today, only a few hundred statues are preserved, counting heads without bodies and bodies missing heads and limbs. Fortunately, the few survivors – pieces of bronze statues, scraps dumped by ancient bronze foundries, ancient texts, and occasional new finds – offer invaluable insights into the ancient bronze statuary industry. In this magisterial work, Carol Mattusch brings her deep knowledge of ancient technology to the study of bronze sculpture from multiple perspectives. Analyzing ancient literary testimonia together with the material evidence, she charts the production process from start to finished statues and to modern workshop analogies. Exploring standards for size, appearance, and placement of classical public statuary, her volume also considers issues related to Roman private collections of bronzes, including taste, production, means of acquisition, display, and loss or occasional survival of ancient bronzes.

Ancient Fantasies and Modern Power
  • Neo-Antique Architecture at American World's Fairs, 1893–1915
  • Elizabeth R. Macaulay
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    April 2026
    Print publication:
    30 April 2026
  • Chicago's Columbian Exposition of 1893 celebrated the quadricentennial of Columbus's 'discovery” of the Americas by creating a fantastical white city composed of Roman triumphal arches and domes, Corinthian colonnades, and Egyptian obelisks. World's fairs were among the most important cultural, socio-economic, and political phenomena of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: millions visited hoping to understand the modernity and progress of these cities and the nascent superpower of the United States. But what they found was often a representation of the past. From 1893 to 1915, ancient Greco-Roman and Egyptian architecture was deployed to create immersive environments at Chicago, Nashville, Omaha, St. Louis, and San Francisco. The seemingly endless adaptations of ancient architecture at these five fairs demonstrated that ancient architecture can symbolize and transmit the complex-and often paradoxical or contradictory-ideas that defined the United States at the turn of the twentieth century and still endure today.

A writer’s guide to Ancient Rome
  • Carey Fleiner
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    08 January 2026
  • How do you create a fictional story out of an historical period? What do you need to know about the people, the places, the events? What’s the better inspiration: historical scholarship or popular knowledge? A writer’s guide to Ancient Rome serves as inspiration and a guide to the Roman population, economy, laws, leisure, and religion for the author, student, general reader seeking an introduction to what made the Romans tick. The Guide considers trends and themes from roughly 200 BCE to 200 CE with the occasional foray into the antecedents and legacy on either side of the period. Each chapter explicates its main themes with examples from the original sources. Throughout are suggestions for resources to mine for the subject at hand and particular bits affected by scholarly debate and changing interpretation based on new discoveries or reinterpretation of written and material remains. It’s up to you whether or not you will produce a work of careful verisimilitude or anachronistic silliness (or one of the flavours in between). That’s your call as creator. This little guide is but a brief survey of a vast quantity of resources, sources, and scholarship on the Classical world that is available for reflection, evaluation, interpretation, and creativity. It is intended to open doors for further reading and consideration as you construct your own Roman world – it’s a welcome mat inviting you in to listen to the stories of the Romans and to contribute tales of your own.

Rebuilding Histories in the Roman World
  • Architectural Restoration and Temporality from Augustus to Justinian
  • Ann Marie Yasin
  • Published online:
    23 November 2025
    Print publication:
    11 December 2025
  • In this book, Ann Marie Yasin reveals the savvy and subtle ways in which Roman and late Roman patrons across the Mediterranean modulated connections to the past and expectations for the future through their material investments in old architecture. Then as now, reactivation and modification of previously built structures required direct engagement with issues of tradition and novelty, longevity and ephemerality, security and precarity – in short, with how time is perceived in the built environment. The book argues that Roman patrons and audiences were keenly sensitive to all of these issues. It traces spatial and decorative configurations of rebuilt structures, including temples and churches, civic and entertainment buildings, roads and aqueducts, as well as theways such projects were marked and celebrated through ritual and monumental text. In doing so, Yasin charts how local communities engaged with the time of their buildings at a material, experiential level over the course of the first six centuries CE.

Relief in Greek, Roman, and Late Antique Art
  • Edited by Jas' Elsner, Milette Gaifman, Nathaniel B. Jones
  • Published online:
    11 October 2025
    Print publication:
    25 September 2025
  • The artistic category of relief has long dominated scholarly discussions of ancient Greco-Roman art for good reason: images in relief pervaded ancient visual culture from the rise of the Greek city-state through to the Christian era. They are witnessed in public and private contexts; terracotta, bronze, and stone media; techniques as varied as incision, modelling, or repoussé; and scales from the miniature to the monumental. Precisely because of the ubiquity and fluidity of ancient relief, the category as such has not been given full consideration in own right, and many questions have remained under-theorized. Boasting an international cast of contributors, this volume addresses key questions about relief across the geographic and temporal scope of the ancient world, including how relief was conceptualized within antiquity, what role materials and techniques played in its creation, and what the relations were between relief media and their effects on viewers.

The Art of Queenship in the Hellenistic World
  • Patricia Eunji Kim
  • Published online:
    11 July 2025
    Print publication:
    31 July 2025
  • In The Art of Queenship in the Hellenistic World, Patricia Eunji Kim examines the visual and material cultures of Hellenistic queens, the royal and dynastic women who served as subjects and patrons of art. Exploring evidence in the interconnected eastern Mediterranean and western Asia from the fourth to second centuries BCE, Kim argues that the arts of queenship were central to expressions of dynastic (and sometimes even imperial) consolidation, continuity, and legitimacy. From gems, coins, and vessels to monuments and sculpture, the visual and material cultures of queenship appeared in a range of sacred settings, public spaces, royal courts, and domestic domains. Encompassing several dynasties, including the Hecatomnids, Argeads, Ptolemies, Seleucids, and Attalids, Kim inaugurates new methods for comparing and interpreting visual articulations of queenship and ideal femininity from distinct yet culturally entangled contexts, thus illuminating the ways that women had an impact art and politics in the ancient world.

The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Late Antique Art and Archaeology
  • Volume 1, Architecture, Artifacts and Evidence
  • Edited by Leonard V. Rutgers, Neil Christie, Robin M. Jensen, Jodi Magness
  • Published online:
    04 July 2025
    Print publication:
    31 July 2025
  • Late Antiquity marked one of the most significant transitions in European history-one that saw the rise of Christianity and the transformation of the classical Mediterranean world of ancient Rome. The richness of its art and the wealth of its archaeological remains have increasingly been recognised in recent decades and new discoveries and ongoing research are currently altering the ways in which we perceive the period. These two volumes provide a wide-ranging guide to the art and archaeology of the period 300-700 CE. Key monuments and artifact-types are discussed and placed in their historical contexts, but significant attention is also paid to the main cities, regions and peoples playing a prominent role in the history of the period as well as to some key issues and debates in its study. The chapters are written by leading experts and will be invaluable for any student or scholar interested in the period.

The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Late Antique Art and Archaeology
  • Volume 2, Settlements, Regions, Peoples and Debates
  • Edited by Leonard V. Rutgers, Neil Christie, Robin M. Jensen, Jodi Magness
  • Published online:
    04 July 2025
    Print publication:
    31 July 2025
  • Late Antiquity marked one of the most significant transitions in European history-one that saw the rise of Christianity and the transformation of the classical Mediterranean world of ancient Rome. The richness of its art and the wealth of its archaeological remains have increasingly been recognised in recent decades and new discoveries and ongoing research are currently altering the ways in which we perceive the period. These two volumes provide a wide-ranging guide to the art and archaeology of the period 300-700 CE. Key monuments and artifact-types are discussed and placed in their historical contexts, but significant attention is also paid to the main cities, regions and peoples playing a prominent role in the history of the period as well as to some key issues and debates in its study. The chapters are written by leading experts and will be invaluable for any student or scholar interested in the period.

The Temple of Artemis at Sardis
  • The Hellenistic Temple Tradition in Asia Minor
  • Fikret Yegul, Diane Favro
  • Published online:
    30 May 2025
    Print publication:
    03 July 2025
  • Nestled beneath the 'pointed peaks' of the legendary Tmolos Mountains, the temple and sanctuary of Artemis at Sardis is one of the most impressive monuments of classical antiquity. Dating to the Hellenistic period, it was undertaken, not by a king, but by Stratonike, a 'fiery' Hellenistic queen, and redesigned under the Roman emperor Hadrian, when it became the center of an imperial cult. In this volume, Fikret Yegül and Diane Favro explore the Temple of Sardis from multiple perspectives. Offering a close archaeological analysis of the temple, they also provides new insights into its unique design; the changing nature of religious and cult practices at the temple; the relationship to its setting; and its benefactors. Attention is paid to place this extraordinary temple in the larger context of Greek and Roman religious architecture in Asia Minor. Richly illustrated with over 200 color images, including historical paintings and drawings, it also includes digital reconstructions of the temple are published here for the first time.

Religious Architecture and Roman Expansion
  • Temples, Terracottas, and the Shaping of Identity, 3rd-1st c. BCE
  • Sophie Crawford-Brown
  • Published online:
    06 March 2025
    Print publication:
    06 March 2025
  • Religious Architecture and Roman Expansion uses architectural terracottas as a lens for examining the changing landscape of central Italy during the period of Roman military expansion, and for asking how local communities reacted to this new political reality. It emphasizes the role of local networks and exchange in the creation of communal identity, as well as the power of visual expression in the formulation and promotion of local history. Through detailed analyses of temple terracottas, Sophie Crawford-Brown sheds new light on 'Romanization' and colonization processes between the 3rd and 1st centuries BCE.  She investigates the interactions between colonies and indigenous communities, asking why conquerors might visually emulate the conquered, and what this can mean for power relations in colonial situations. Finally, Crawford-Brown explores the role of objects in creating cultural memory and the intensity of our need for collective history-even when that 'history' has been largely invented.

Roman Identity and Lived Religion
  • Baptismal Art in Late Antiquity
  • Stefanie Lenk
  • Published online:
    08 February 2025
    Print publication:
    20 February 2025
  • Christianity is often considered prevalent when it comes to defining the key values of late antique society, whereas 'feeling connected to the Roman past' is commonly regarded as an add-on for cultivated elites. This book demonstrates the significant impact of popular Roman culture on the religious identity of common Christians from the fifth to the seventh century in the Mediterranean world. Baptism is central to the formation of Christian identity. The decoration of baptisteries reveals that traditional Roman culture persisted as an integral component of Christian identity in various communities. In their baptisteries, Christians visually and spatially evoked their links to Roman and, at times, even pagan traditions. A close examination of visual and material sources in North Africa, the Iberian Peninsula, and Italy shows that baptisteries served roles beyond mere conduits to Christian orthodoxy.

The Romanization of Britain
  • An Essay in Archaeological Interpretation
  • 2nd edition
  • Martin Millett
  • Foreword by Charlotte Higgins
  • Published online:
    02 January 2025
    Print publication:
    16 January 2025
  • The Romanization of Britain was greeted, on first publication, as an innovative study of cultural change and interaction, offering a bold new perspective on Roman Britain based on archaeological evidence. It set out to explore the social dynamics of cultural change from a local perspective by looking at the patterns of interaction between provincial peoples and imperial power. Drawing together a wide range of excavated data as well as textual evidence, it provided a new synthesis of the province whilst offering an alternative way of understanding cultural change in the Roman Empire more widely. Its publication served to catalyse debate, stimulating very considerable discussion and generating a wide variety of responses in a range of publications. This revised edition adds a new introductory essay exploring the genesis of this classic work and reviewing the subsequent debate, while also recalibrating the author's perspective on cultural change within the wider Roman provinces.

The Remarkable Life, Death, and Afterlife of an Ordinary Roman
  • A Social History
  • Jeremy Hartnett
  • Published online:
    16 December 2024
    Print publication:
    23 January 2025
  • When we think of Romans, Julius Caesar or Constantine might spring to mind. But what was life like for everyday folk, those who gazed up at the palace rather than looking out from within its walls? In this book, Jeremy Hartnett offers a detailed view of an average Roman, an individual named Flavius Agricola. Though Flavius was only a generation or two removed from slavery, his successful life emerges from his careful commemoration in death: a poetic epitaph and life-sized marble portrait showing him reclining at table. This ensemble not only enables Hartnett to reconstruct Flavius' biography, as well as his wife's, but also permits a nuanced exploration of many aspects of Roman life, such as dining, sex, worship of foreign deities, gender, bodily display, cultural literacy, religious experience, blended families, and visiting the dead at their tombs. Teasing provocative questions from this ensemble, Hartnett also recounts the monument's scandalous discovery and extraordinary afterlife over the centuries. 

Recycling the Roman Villa
  • Material Salvage and the Medieval Circular Economy
  • Beth Munro
  • Published online:
    08 November 2024
    Print publication:
    31 October 2024
  • Though abandoned between the third and seventh centuries CE, many Roman villas enjoyed an afterlife in late antiquity as a source of building materials. Villa complexes currently serve as a unique archaeological setting in that their recycling phases are often better preserved than those  at urban sites. Building on a foundational knowledge of Roman architecture and construction, Beth Munro offers a retrospective study of the material value of and deconstruction processes at villas. She explores the technical properties of glass, metals, and limestone, materials that were most frequently recycled; the craftspeople who undertook this work, as well as the economic and culture drivers of recycling. She also examines the commissioning landowners and their rural networks, especially as they relate to church construction. Bringing a multidisciplinary lens to recycling practices in antiquity, Munro proposes new theoretical and methodological approaches for assessing architectural salvage and reprocessing within the context of an ancient circular economy.

Religion and the Making of Roman Africa
  • Votive Stelae, Traditions, and Empire
  • Matthew M. McCarty
  • Published online:
    24 October 2024
    Print publication:
    07 November 2024
  • This book fundamentally rewrites the cultural and religious history of North Africa under the Roman Empire, focalized through rituals related to child sacrifice and the carved-stone monuments associated with such offerings. Earlier colonial archaeologies have stressed the failure of the empire to 'Romanize' Indigenous and Punic settler populations, mobilizing inscriptions and sculpture to mirror and explain modern European colonial failures as the result of ethnic African permanence. Instead, this book uses postcolonial theory, pragmatic semiotics, material epistemologies, and relational ontologies to develop a new account of how Roman hegemony transformed and was reproduced through signifying practices in even a seemingly traditional, 'un-Roman' rite such as child sacrifice. In doing so, the book offers a model for understanding the Roman Empire, the peoples who lived across its provinces, and their material worlds.

Centaurs and Snake-Kings
  • Hybrids and the Greek Imagination
  • Jeremy McInerney
  • Published online:
    16 August 2024
    Print publication:
    25 July 2024
  • Griffins, centaurs and gorgons: the Greek imagination teems with wondrous, yet often monstrous, hybrids. Jeremy McInerney discusses how these composite creatures arise from the entanglement of humans and animals. Overlaying such enmeshment is the rich cultural exchange experienced by Greeks across the Mediterranean. Hybrids, the author reveals, capture the anxiety of cross-cultural encounter, where similarity and incongruity were conjoined. Hybridity likewise expresses instability of identity. The ancient sea, that most changeable ancient domain, was viewed as home to monsters like Skylla; while on land the centaur might be hypersexual yet also hypercivilized, like Cheiron. Medusa may be destructive, yet also alluring. Wherever conventional values or behaviours are challenged, there the hybrid gives that threat a face. This absorbing work unveils a mercurial world of shifting categories that offer an alternative to conventional certainties. Transforming disorder into images of wonder, Greek hybrids – McInerney suggests – finally suggest other ways of being human.

Style and Meaning in Late Antique Art
  • Ancients and Moderns on Seeing and Thinking
  • Sarah Bassett
  • Published online:
    15 August 2024
    Print publication:
    08 August 2024
  • How do we best see and understand the art of late antiquity? One of the perceived challenges of so doing is that this is a period whose visual production has been defined as stylistically abstract and emotionally spiritual, and therefore elusive. But this is a perception which – in her path-breaking new book – Sarah Bassett boldly challenges, offering two novel lines of interpretative inquiry. She first argues, by focusing on the art of late antiquity in late nineteenth-century Viennese intellectual and artistic circles, that that period's definition of late antique form was in fact a response to contemporaneous political concerns, anticipating modernist thinking and artistic practice. She then suggests that late antique viewers never actually abandoned a sense of those mimetic goals that characterized Greek and Roman habits of representation. This interpretative shift is transformative because it allows us to understand the full range and richness of late antique visual experience.

Minoan Zoomorphic Culture
  • Between Bodies and Things
  • Emily S. K. Anderson
  • Published online:
    17 May 2024
    Print publication:
    06 June 2024
  • Since the earliest era of archaeological discovery on Crete, vivid renderings of animals have been celebrated as defining elements of Minoan culture. Animals were crafted in a rich range of substances and media in the broad Minoan world, from tiny seal-stones to life-size frescoes. In this study, Emily Anderson fundamentally rethinks the status of these zoomorphic objects. Setting aside their traditional classification as 'representations' or signs, she recognizes them as distinctively real embodiments of animals in the world. These fabricated animals-engaged with in quiet tombs, bustling harbors, and monumental palatial halls-contributed in unique ways to Bronze Age Aegean sociocultural life and affected the status of animals within people's lived experience. Some gave new substance and contour to familiar biological species, while many exotic and fantastical beasts gained physical reality only in these fabricated embodiments. As real presences, the creatures that the Minoans crafted artfully toyed with expectation and realized new dimensions within and between animalian identities.

Divine Music in Archaic and Classical Greek Art
  • Seeing the Songs of the Gods
  • Carolyn Laferrière
  • Published online:
    01 February 2024
    Print publication:
    29 February 2024
  • In this volume, Carolyn M. Laferrière examines Athenian vase-paintings and reliefs depicting the gods most frequently shown as musicians to reconstruct how images suggest the sounds of the music the gods made. Incorporating insights from recent work in sensory studies, she considers formal analysis together with literary and archaeological evidence to explore the musical culture of Athens. Laferrière argues that images could visually suggest the sounds of the gods' music. This representational strategy, whereby sight and sound are blurred, conveys the 'unhearable' nature of their music: because it cannot be physically heard, it falls to the human imagination to provide its sounds and awaken viewers' multisensory engagement with the images. Moreover, when situated within their likely original contexts, the objects establish a network of interaction between the viewer, the visualized music, and the landscape, all of which determined how divine music was depicted, perceived, and reciprocated. Laferrière demonstrates that participation in the gods' musical performances offered worshippers a multisensory experience of divine presence.

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