Books by Mont Allen
Allen, Mont. *The Death of Myth on Roman Sarcophagi: Allegory and Visual Narrative in the Late Empire*. Series: Greek Culture in the Roman World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022.
A strange thing happened to Roman sarcophagi in the third century: their Greek mythic imagery van... more 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
Journal Articles by Mont Allen
Allen, Mont. "Cows, Sheep, and Sages: Bucolic Sarcophagi and the Question of 'Elite Retreat'." *Römische Mitteilungen* 124 (2018): 241-267.
Bucolic sarcophagi, being the most popular genre of figural sarcophagi, occupy a central place in... more Bucolic sarcophagi, being the most popular genre of figural sarcophagi, occupy a central place in the history of Roman archaeology and art. But what did their imagery actually reference, and what was its allure? For traction this article proposes that we ‘listen to the silences’ in the imagery, paying attention to what is absent as well as present. Why, for example, were pastoral scenes so much more popular than agricultural ones? And why are there so very many with sheep — but so few with cattle? Focusing on these lacunae, I demonstrate, helps us to better reconstruct the valence that these objects possessed in the Roman visual imagination. In more concrete terms, this allows us to (1) gain a richer understanding of why bucolic motifs were so often combined with ‘philosopher’ imagery; and (2) address the extent to which the bucolic sarcophagi did or did not target the interests of specific political classes (with ramifications for understanding who bought them).
Chapters in Edited Volumes by Mont Allen
Allen, Mont. "Isolating the Deceased in the Picture: Tools and Technique on Mythological Sarcophagi." In *Flesheaters: An International Symposium on Roman Sarcophagi*, edited by Christopher H. Hallett, 97-123. Sarkophag-Studien, no. 11. Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2019. (peer-reviewed)
Of all the ways to integrate real human subjects with mythological subject matter on Roman sarcop... more Of all the ways to integrate real human subjects with mythological subject matter on Roman sarcophagi, none was more direct than the strategy of mythological portraiture: the outfitting of mythological figures with portrait heads featuring the facial features of real individuals. But if this mode of commemoration were to work, it required one thing: that the viewer be able to distinguish the heads of deceased humans from those of mythological characters at a glance.
The solution developed by Roman carvers was to separate these figures through the tooling of their hairdos: while the hair of mythic figures was extensively drilled, that of the deceased was rendered solely with the chisel. This article examines how Roman sculptors thus invested sculptural technique itself with semantic meaning, as a contrast in tools and toolmarks was pressed into service as a language for artiiculating the ontological status – and with it, the representational function – of the various figures arrayed on the coffin.
Allen, Mont. "Technique and Message in Roman Art." In *A Companion to Roman Art*, edited by Barbara Borg, 153-171. Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015.
Book Reviews and Other Short Pieces by Mont Allen
Allen, Mont. "A Comprehensive Survey of Strigillated Sarcophagi." Review of *Roman Strigillated Sarcophagi: Art and Social History*, by Janet Huskinson. *Classical Review* 67, no. 2 (October 2017): 526-528.
Allen, Mont. "Sarcophagus." In *The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece and Rome*, edited by Michael Gagarin, 6:214-218. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Conference Papers by Mont Allen
Allen, Mont. "Who Bought Bucolic? Sheep, Cows, and Villas on Roman Sarcophagi." Annual Meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America, San Francisco, January 6-9, 2016.
What was the allure of the so-called “bucolic” sarcophagi that so dominated Roman funerary output... more What was the allure of the so-called “bucolic” sarcophagi that so dominated Roman funerary output of the later third century? Of those many thousands of coffins with figural scenes carved between 250 and 310 A.D., roughly every fourth one featured bucolic imagery; metropolitan workshops, it seems, could hardly crank them out quickly enough, and their scenes of rustic life amidst tranquil surrounds went on to define the Roman visual imagination of the late Empire. Yet their popularity remains opaque. What resonance would they have had? What, actually, did these pieces *show*? And who bought them?
Statistical analysis of the roughly 400 extant bucolic sarcophagi reveals definite patterns in the imagery, with a marked preference for depicting certain types of animals, landscapes, and activities over others: purely pastoral scenes heavily outweigh the small number that incorporate agricultural activities; and among the former, sheep and, to a lesser extent, goats are far more commonly depicted than cattle or horses. Gaining critical leverage on these patterns requires reconstructing the set of associations and assumptions that Roman viewers would have brought to bear on these pieces. Here I marshal a variety of evidence, both literary (the writings of Livy and Cato on the tension between farming and herding; Varro’s treatise on agricultural practices; the rural social hierarchies related in the *Vita Donati*) and archaeological (the booming construction of great *horrea* in major cities during the second century; the ongoing shift in Italy’s rural economy towards agricultural over pastoral yield; bucolic motifs on Roman coinage). The resulting picture makes it clear that -- contrary to the most commonly accepted theory for their popularity -- the scenes on bucolic sarcophagi were pointedly *not* intended to evoke the rural estates dotting the Roman countryside, nor did they mean to index the villas of Rome’s Senatorial class. They strove, rather, to conjure up the romantic, hazy, and exoticized landscape of the Arcadian pastoral idyll, an atmosphere thickly Greek. In abstract terms, these findings force us to rethink the third-century disappearance of mythological imagery from metropolitan sarcophagi. They also, however, provide concrete traction in the ongoing debate over sarcophagi’s clientele, allowing us to specify which classes and social groups were indeed the intended market for these elaborate coffins.
Allen, Mont. "Christianity and the Demythologization of Roman Sarcophagi: Numbers & Purchasing Power." Annual Meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America, New Orleans, January 8-11, 2015.
A perplexing development sweeps over Roman sarcophagi of the Late Empire: the unexpected 'Entmyt... more A perplexing development sweeps over Roman sarcophagi of the Late Empire: the unexpected 'Entmythologisierung' or “demythologization” of their imagery. These relief-carved coffins had featured bold mythological scenes since the very beginning of their mainstream production early in the second century, when inhumation had replaced cremation as the favored means for disposing of the dead. How then to make sense of this repertoire’s peculiar withering and subsequent abandonment on later specimens, as mythological narratives were truncated, gods and heroes were excised, and genres featuring no mythic content whatsoever -- such as the late third century’s endless procession of sarcophagi featuring bucolic shepherds and studious philosophers -- came to the fore?
Was it perhaps driven by a burgeoning Christian faith? To put it more succinctly, was mythological relief a casualty of Christianization? This explanation proposes that sarcophagi featuring seasons, shepherds, philosophers, and hunters gained in popularity because their imagery was religiously neutral and thus capable of appealing to both old pagan and new Christian clientele alike, a flexibility that the older mythological sarcophagi did not have. To be mythless meant to be non-affiliated, and thus palatable to all. In a time of religious transformation -- which for funerary art always means a time of market transformation -- this, so the argument goes, was a selling point.
Of all the explanations commonly offered for sarcophagi’s demythologization this is perhaps the most popular, with a pedigree stretching from Rodenwaldt (1921) to Zanker (2010), yet the argument itself has never been subjected to real scrutiny. It rests on three fundamental assumptions: (1) that Christians did actually purchase neutral/mythless ‘pagan’ sarcophagi for their own use; (2) that they did so in numbers sufficient to affect the repertoire of pieces that pagan workshops produced; and (3) that Christians continued to buy neutral sarcophagi even after Christian ones were available. For critical traction on these assumptions this paper turns to a close examination of the surviving monuments themselves, supplemented by social scientific reconstructions of Christian expansion and purchasing power. It argues that the archaeological record offers minimal evidence for Christian purchase of mythless sarcophagi, and that Christian numbers and purchasing power for most of the third century were simply too low to have contributed in any significant fashion to the shift in market production towards demythologized pieces. A nascent Christianity, in conclusion, can have played no real role in the extinction of mythological imagery on Roman sarcophagi.
Allen, Mont. "In Time with the Seasons? Repetition and Movement on Roman Season Sarcophagi." Annual Meeting of the College Art Association, Chicago, February 10-13, 2010.
The literature on repetition in Roman art is extensive but single-minded, focusing almost exclus... more The literature on repetition in Roman art is extensive but single-minded, focusing almost exclusively on the nature and status of Roman copies of Greek originals. This is a pity, since it hardly begins to exhaust the uses Roman artists found for repetition. If repeating elements can encourage the viewer to actively juxtapose and compare images which might otherwise be considered only in isolation, it can also serve other, more corporeal ends—such as bodily steering the beholder in a certain direction, encouraging her to move laterally along the work. This phenomenon is observable in Roman painting, particularly in domestic murals decorating corridors and other rooms of passage: one thinks, for example, of the Odyssey Landscapes, whose constant repetition of trees, boulders, and cliffs pointing in the same direction works to physically usher the viewer along the frieze (and down the hall) in the direction of narrative progression. In such cases, then, we are dealing with a clear consonance between the somatic effects of visual repetition and the function of the object—in this case, a corridor—whose surfaces it adorns.
What, however, of other species of Roman artworks, such as carved relief sarcophagi, those objects whose scale of production and sheer cultural visibility overwhelms every other artistic genre of the third and fourth centuries? To gain critical leverage, I propose focusing on a particular subgenre of these coffins: the hugely popular Season sarcophagi. These make an ideal test case, not just because of their characteristic repetition of near-identical personifications of the Seasons (usually four, but sometimes as many as eight) along the face of the frieze, but because the cyclical nature of the Seasons already implies (chronological) movement and passage. This paper examines to what extent such Season sarcophagi employ the reiterated figures of the Seasons to translate this chronological movement into spatial terms, pulling the viewer along (and perhaps even around) the coffin in time with the Seasons themselves. This in turn requires addressing several intersecting questions: Are Season sarcophagi more likely to assume a rounded shape than a rectilinear one? What do we make of those which change the order of the Seasons? Under what conditions can their number be reduced to two, or increased to eight? And how does the movement implied by the cyclical iteration of the Seasons sit with the static compositions of most other late Roman artworks, such as the frieze on the Arch of Constantine, which employs masses of repeated figures to instead stifle movement and fix all attention on the central hieratic figure? The goal of this paper is an improved understanding of how repetition functions in late Roman art, its capacity to alternatively spur or cripple movement, and its occasional clash with the formal requirements of various genres.
Allen, Mont. "Drilling the Dead? Separating Mythological and Mortal on Roman Sarcophagi." Annual Meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America, Chicago, January 3-6, 2008.
A provocative development within Roman funerary art was the invention, in the late second and ear... more A provocative development within Roman funerary art was the invention, in the late second and early third century AD, of techniques for differentiating the image of the deceased from those mythological figures with whom he shared pictorial space on the front of a sarcophagus. The most popular involved singling him out by using different tools and techniques to render the hair: while the coiffures of ancillary mythic figures are heavily bored and drilled -- indeed, thematize the drill -- the hair of the deceased is worked exclusively with the chisel, spared any trace of the drill’s bite.
This central yet under-analyzed convention, which structures the depiction of the dead on almost every metropolitan Roman sarcophagus of the third century, has yet to be adequately theorized. To reconstruct its significance and trace its logic I suggest picking the phenomenon up at both ends, examining both its genesis in the late second century (which requires highlighting its unexpected departure from the conventions of contemporary imperial and private portraiture in the round), and its cessation in the early fourth (which demands addressing why pagan sarcophagi should cling to the convention until the very end of their production, when Christian sarcophagi abandon it a generation before). The results: what began as simply a means of identifying and isolating the deceased within a composition quickly gained currency as an affirmation of the fundamental gap separating mere mortals from mythic and divine figures, and was only abandoned as a new religion claimed to close this gap. The history of the chisel/drill distinction in Roman funerary carving was thus intimately tied to the changing fortunes of pagan polytheism, whose central ontological divide, between mortal and immortal, it had given visual form.
Allen, Mont. "Bridled in Bronze: The Prominence of the Horse on the Parthenon Frieze." Annual Meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America, San Diego, January 4-7, 2007.
The prominence of mounted riders on the Parthenon Frieze continues to puzzle. If the frieze was... more The prominence of mounted riders on the Parthenon Frieze continues to puzzle. If the frieze was meant to evoke the Panathenaiac festivals, why include so many horsemen, when our literary accounts emphasize the ranks of foot-soldiers accompanying the procession? And why show the apobates race as the sole contest, when it was hardly the central Panathenaic competition? If the frieze was intended as a monument to those fallen at Marathon, every one a hoplite, why memorialize them as cavalry? If the procession was to embody the city’s democratic ideal, then why allow the cavalry -- that traditional preserve of the aristocracy -- to dominate the field? And if the frieze represents no Panathenaia but rather centers on Erechtheus’ sacrifice of his daughter, why include horsemen and chariots at all?
Often overlooked in discussion of the frieze are data provided by Pindar, Pausanias, and Corinthian coinage: that Athena herself invented the bridle, and -- under the names of Athena Chalinitis and Athena Hippia -- even received cult on this account. Close attention to the frieze’s imagery of taming and bridling, combined with technical analysis of the Parthenon’s extensive yet selective use of added bronze to highlight reins and bridles, reveals an artistic program which conspicuously thematizes the goddess’s civilizing gift.
Allen Mont. "Framing Greek and Eastern Artistic Mixture: The Case of the Lycian Sarcophagus of Sidon." Annual Meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America, Montréal, January 5-8, 2006.
Interest in artistic borrowing and exchange between Greeks and their eastern neighbors has seen ... more Interest in artistic borrowing and exchange between Greeks and their eastern neighbors has seen a recent resurgence, and research on works from the artistic border zones of the Eastern Mediterranean — works such as the Mausoleum, Alexander Sarcophagus, Nereid Monument, and ‘Graeco-Persian’ gems and seals — has proliferated. A corresponding proliferation of new questions and methods for exploring this material, however, is less manifest. Many projects continue under the assumption that artistic form can serve as a straightforward index for determining ethnic identity of artist or cultural affiliation of patron, or treat artistic mixture as a passive process, conceiving it merely as the unwitting absorption and haphazard blending of various visual vocabularies.
I suggest that a close reading of the so-called ‘Lycian Sarcophagus’, unearthed at the royal necropolis of Sidon in 1887, may help to expand our interpretive options when confronted with objects of apparently mixed artistic pedigree. Attending to both iconography and political history, I propose that the monument’s deployment of Greek, Persian, and other elements was carefully orchestrated to speak to, and flatter, at least two different ethnic audiences, so that this most cosmopolitan of mercantile cities could proclaim its important role in the international arena of the fifth century while ensuring that it would offend neither victor nor vanquished. I end by developing the methodological implications: rather than a passive product of cultural interaction, artistic mixture in the Eastern Mediterranean sometimes represented a highly calculated political strategy, adopted when an object intended for state display had to reckon with disparate (and frequently hostile) viewing communities.
Colloquia Organized & Chaired by Mont Allen
Fraught Antiquities: Fakes and Forgeries. Annual Meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America, Philadelphia, January 5-8, 2012.
Although often treated as mere curiosities extraneous to our discipline, forgeries are anything ... more Although often treated as mere curiosities extraneous to our discipline, forgeries are anything but. Their creators count among our canniest students, and they craft with us in mind. No objects are more carefully constructed to meet our own expectations and match our own conceptions of what is plausible and what not. By cleaving so closely to established scholarly consensus so as not to raise suspicion, and by forcing questions of authenticity, forgeries can serve to throw into the starkest possible relief the extent and limits of our knowledge. For this reason alone they deserve our careful consideration.
Sadly, the study of forgeries has gained new urgency on other grounds, thanks to current events in the Middle East. Knowing that their objects are less likely to be spotted when they can be slipped into a market flush with real illicit antiquities, forgers prefer to work in the wake of widespread looting. As a result, the recent wholesale plundering of sites in Egypt, and the likelihood of similar occurrences in Libya, makes a rash of future forgeries lamentably likely.
The time thus seems ripe for a colloquium session devoted to this rich yet distressing topic. Our papers have been selected not only for their cultural coverage (Greek, Roman, and Etruscan) and the variety of media addressed (gold jewelry, wall paintings, carved gems, marble sculptures, bronze figurines, and even medical instruments), but also for the range of issues raised. Two of our papers treat the various tools available for ferreting out fakes: Richard De Puma’s “A Gold Pectoral in the Metropolitan Museum of Art” tests those appropriate to Etruscan jewelry, while Kenneth Lapatin’s “Little Big Lies: Forgeries of Ancient Gems” does the same for engraved stones from the Greek and Roman worlds. Our other three take a step backward, examining the various ways in which forgeries are packaged to meet the expectations of scholars and the desires of collectors: Laure Marest-Caffey’s “Artful Deceptions: The Comte de Caylus, Winckelmann, and Forged Roman Wall Paintings” looks at how forgers of frescoes crafted their works to appeal to contemporary luminaries in the 18th century; Jessica Powers’s “Dubitanda on Display: Roman Sculptures and Authenticity in the Museum” does the same for 19th- and 20th-century forgeries of ancient marbles; and Benton Kidd’s “Real Fakes, Fake Fakes, and Authenticating Marbles by Isotopic Analysis” tackles the problems raised by objects which were not manufactured to deceive, but which later found themselves rebranded as genuine antiquities.
A Breath of Fresco Air: New Approaches to Roman Wall Painting. Annual Meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America, San Antonio, January 6-9, 2011.
Attracting admiration and scholarly attention for more than 250 years, Roman wall painting conti... more Attracting admiration and scholarly attention for more than 250 years, Roman wall painting continues to dazzle. In recent years, a wealth of international blockbuster exhibitions have turned the spotlight on Campania and Rome, with special care taken to highlight their frescoes through lavish reconstructions and full-color catalogues: in 2009/10 alone came the spectacular exhibitions *Pompeii and the Roman Villa* (Washington, D.C.), *Otium Ludens* (Ravenna), *Vivere à Pompei* (Yokohama), and *A Day in Pompeii* (Wellington), all of which traveled to multiple continents. In addition to these, shows of Roman wall painting are proliferating in Italy’s national museums: several comprehensive exhibits have emerged in Rome, and 2009 saw the much-anticipated reopening of the Roman wall painting galleries in the National Archaeological Museum in Naples. But while this explosion of interest attests the relevance and power of this material, our approaches to it have enjoyed little comparable expansion. Stylistic sequence, the internal arrangement of the Roman house, and questions of self-presentation and status display still dominate the account; and while of undisputed value for understanding Roman painting, they could benefit from new scrutiny and new company.
This is what our colloquium session aims to provide. Our first three papers demonstrate novel methods for examining the role of wall painting in the public realm: Michael Anderson’s “The Spatial and Visual Context of Pompeian Wall Painting” uses Geographical Information Systems to reconstruct the full architectural environment of several houses in order to reveal which walls would and would not have been visible to particular visitors and inhabitants, and the effect this had on their decoration. Molly Swetnam-Burland’s “Isis, Io, and Ovid’s Syrinx” attends to both literary and archaeological remains to illuminate the fresco cycle decorating one of Pompeii’s famous monuments, the Temple of Isis. And Stephanie Pearson’s “An Un-Augustan Understanding of the Third Style” applies a critical eye to proposed parallels between private painting, public monuments, and the emperor’s political programs. Our final two papers turn to an intimate private sphere, offering fresh interpretations of some of the most familiar yet problematic murals to come from Pompeii: Seth Estrin’s “Dining with the Mysteries” presents a hardheaded discussion of the Villa of the Mysteries, arguing for a revision of overly fanciful interpretations which have misconstrued the novelty and strangeness of its frieze, while Verity Platt’s “Agamemnon’s Grief” explores the close relationship between certain puzzling aspects of Roman rhetoric and a popular set of artistic motifs known from the House of the Tragic Poet and other Pompeian houses.
Facture Speaks: Material, Technique, and Meaning in Ancient Art. Annual Meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America, Anaheim, January 6-9, 2010.
The student of ancient art often faces a divided methodology, in which the study of subject matt... more The student of ancient art often faces a divided methodology, in which the study of subject matter dwells on symbolism and meaning but ignores the materiality of its objects, while the study of material facture and artistic technique dwells on physical properties but brackets questions of meaning. Such lack of integration is understandable, but can cause problems when we assume that these separate domains map onto the conceptions of art held by ancient craftsmen and viewers themselves. For in the gap between our approaches resides an entire dimension of ancient image-making, one that our bifurcated methods have conditioned us to miss: the communicative potential of material and technique. The time thus seems ripe for a session devoted to this central yet overlooked aspect of ancient artistic production. To throw it into the sharpest possible relief, we propose a session of six case studies. Each is devoted to a single important genre or medium; and each raises a different question about the intersection of facture and meaning within that medium.
Our first two papers focus on the symbolic associations accorded materials themselves: Alessandra Giumlia-Mair’s “The Symbolic Significance of Metals and Alloys” documents how Greek and Roman metallurgists creating composite statues selected alloys not only for their working properties (as we might expect), but also for their symbolic associations; while Alexis Castor’s “Gilding the Lily” shows how changes in the cultural significance of both gold and animals during the Persian and Hellenistic periods shaped their intersection in jewelry. The other three focus on the significance of technique: Kenneth Lapatin’s “Intaglio to Cameo” details how the rarity of appropriate material for cameos, combined with the more exacting techniques of carving they required, affected their iconography and status vis-à-vis intaglios; Stephanie Pearson’s “From the (Back)ground Up” examines how the distinctive Gandharan method of relief carving led its sculptors to favor certain compositions and subject matter; and Peter Schultz’s “The Politics of Erasing Facture” demonstrates how erasing toolmarks and other traces of facture from stone sculpture could itself carry a political message.
Taken as a group, then, our papers cover five of the most important genres of artistic production in antiquity, and illustrate the manifold ways in which ancient craftsmen and viewers — both Greek and Roman, Persian and Gandharan — accorded meaning to material facture itself.
Myth on Roman Sarcophagi. Annual Meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America, Chicago, January 3-6, 2008.
The last half century has not been kind to Roman sarcophagi. This is unfortunate. As monuments,... more The last half century has not been kind to Roman sarcophagi. This is unfortunate. As monuments, they are as characteristically Roman as portraiture and historical relief. And in terms of scale of production and sheer cultural visibility, they overwhelm every other artistic genre of the third century: private portraiture dwindles and historical relief all but disappears, yet this is precisely when the manufacture of sarcophagi reaches its zenith, absorbing vast amounts of marble, labor, and capital. These hewn coffins and their sculpted images seem to have captured the imagination of an entire culture, and held
it for well over a century. This alone should grant them a central position within the scholarship on Roman archaeology and art history. Yet the last half century has seen them relegated to the periphery of the field, a specialist domain where few venture.
Thankfully the wind is shifting. Recent monographs by Michael Koortbojian, Bjoern Ewald, and Paul Zanker have propelled mythological sarcophagi back into the spotlight, reminding material and cultural historian alike of their centrality for understanding the High and Late Empire. In celebration of the program committee’s call for papers on funerary art, we are proud to offer a colloquium which gathers North America’s sarcophagus specialists for a series of papers showcasing their most recent work.
The presentations are intended to display something of the range of possible methodological approaches to the material. Our first paper, by Bjoern Ewald (“Blood, Death, and Myth on Roman Sarcophagi”) explores the funerary function of myth on Roman coffins by investigating those mythological scenes which advertise their own internal funerary context. Our second paper, by Kathryn McDonnell (“Inappropriate Myths: Inscribed Text and Sculpted Myth on Roman Sarcophagi”) gains critical leverage on the repertoire of carved scenes through epigraphical analysis of their accompanying inscriptions. Our third, by Sinclair Bell (“Dionysus at the Circus: Scenes of Spectacle and Myth on Roman Sarcophagi and Related Monuments”) demonstrates how judicious comparison with non-funerary works can elucidate otherwise opaque imagery. Our fourth, by Francesco de Angelis (“Unique Emotions? Roman Sarcophagi in a Comparative PerspectiveÓ”) extends the comparative approach, juxtaposing Roman and Etruscan pieces in order to bring out the social specificity of each. And our fifth, by Mont Allen (“Drilling the Dead? Separating Mythological and Mortal on Roman Sarcopagi”) considers how Roman sculptors used chisel and drill to mark out mythic figures, turning technique itself into a conveyer of iconographic content.
Our colloquium concludes with discussion by our respondent, Michael Koortbojian.
Art on the Acropolis: Studies in Fifth-Century Sculpture. Annual Meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America, San Diego, January 4-7, 2007.
The Athenian Acropolis has hardly lacked for scholarly attention from classical archaeologists an... more The Athenian Acropolis has hardly lacked for scholarly attention from classical archaeologists and art historians. Yet far from being exhausted, the site and its sculpture remains one of the most fruitful and productive areas of research within the field, in large part because the sheer wealth of material continues to lend itself to the most
varied methodological approaches, from technical analysis and iconography to epigraphy and mythography. With this in mind our colloquium strives for topological rather than methodological unity, showcasing three pairs of papers chosen for their topical resonance and mutual illumination of common themes.
Our first pair of papers — Catherine Keesling’s “A Phantom Acropolis Dedication? Kresilas' Idomeneus (Poseidippos P.Mil.Vogl. AB 64)” and Stephanie Pearsons’s “The Acropolis Anacreon and Athenian Claims to Ionia” — are devoted to freestanding sculpture. While the former shows how careful attention to base inscriptions and epigrams can help in the reconstruction of lost works (in this case, one by Kresilas), the latter attends to political history and contemporary drama to reconstruct the reception of another dedication commonly attributed to the same sculptor.
Our second pair — Rebecca Karberg’s “Images of Aglauros from the Athenian Acropolis” and Maggie Clark’s “Weaver and Warrior: Relating the Two Main Themes of the Parthenon Sculptures to Athena and the Athenians” — address the theme of mothers and wives, showing why the negotiation of virginity and maternity was a peculiarly site-specific problematic. The first examines the Erechtheion, Parthenon, and objects scattered over the Acropolis for images of Aglauros and her sisters (those unwed mothers turned wives in Athenian myth); the second considers their non-mythical counterparts, the images of married Athenian women on the Parthenon’s east frieze, and makes sense of them through the chaste figure of Athena herself.
If these first four focus on freestanding sculpture and material drawn from across the Acropolis, our third pair — Mont Allen’s “Bridled in Bronze: The Prominence of the Horse on the Parthenon Frieze” and Peter Schultz’s “The Athenian Apobates Race and the Iconography of the Parthenon’s West Pediment” — are dedicated to the Parthenon itself. Pursuing cavalcade and chariot race, both papers interrogate the frieze’s odd fondness for equine motifs, and both demonstrate how attention to these motifs reveals a west pediment carefully integrated into the sculptural program established by the frieze itself.
Our respondent, Andrew Stewart, concludes our colloquium by contributing his own perspectives on these topics, drawing on his own work on epigrams and reception theory, gender, and programmatic ensembles within Greek sculpture.
ORGANIZED SESSIONS by Mont Allen
Papers by Mont Allen
Journal of Early Christian Studies, 1995
Uploads
Books by Mont Allen
Journal Articles by Mont Allen
Chapters in Edited Volumes by Mont Allen
The solution developed by Roman carvers was to separate these figures through the tooling of their hairdos: while the hair of mythic figures was extensively drilled, that of the deceased was rendered solely with the chisel. This article examines how Roman sculptors thus invested sculptural technique itself with semantic meaning, as a contrast in tools and toolmarks was pressed into service as a language for artiiculating the ontological status – and with it, the representational function – of the various figures arrayed on the coffin.
Book Reviews and Other Short Pieces by Mont Allen
Conference Papers by Mont Allen
Statistical analysis of the roughly 400 extant bucolic sarcophagi reveals definite patterns in the imagery, with a marked preference for depicting certain types of animals, landscapes, and activities over others: purely pastoral scenes heavily outweigh the small number that incorporate agricultural activities; and among the former, sheep and, to a lesser extent, goats are far more commonly depicted than cattle or horses. Gaining critical leverage on these patterns requires reconstructing the set of associations and assumptions that Roman viewers would have brought to bear on these pieces. Here I marshal a variety of evidence, both literary (the writings of Livy and Cato on the tension between farming and herding; Varro’s treatise on agricultural practices; the rural social hierarchies related in the *Vita Donati*) and archaeological (the booming construction of great *horrea* in major cities during the second century; the ongoing shift in Italy’s rural economy towards agricultural over pastoral yield; bucolic motifs on Roman coinage). The resulting picture makes it clear that -- contrary to the most commonly accepted theory for their popularity -- the scenes on bucolic sarcophagi were pointedly *not* intended to evoke the rural estates dotting the Roman countryside, nor did they mean to index the villas of Rome’s Senatorial class. They strove, rather, to conjure up the romantic, hazy, and exoticized landscape of the Arcadian pastoral idyll, an atmosphere thickly Greek. In abstract terms, these findings force us to rethink the third-century disappearance of mythological imagery from metropolitan sarcophagi. They also, however, provide concrete traction in the ongoing debate over sarcophagi’s clientele, allowing us to specify which classes and social groups were indeed the intended market for these elaborate coffins.
Was it perhaps driven by a burgeoning Christian faith? To put it more succinctly, was mythological relief a casualty of Christianization? This explanation proposes that sarcophagi featuring seasons, shepherds, philosophers, and hunters gained in popularity because their imagery was religiously neutral and thus capable of appealing to both old pagan and new Christian clientele alike, a flexibility that the older mythological sarcophagi did not have. To be mythless meant to be non-affiliated, and thus palatable to all. In a time of religious transformation -- which for funerary art always means a time of market transformation -- this, so the argument goes, was a selling point.
Of all the explanations commonly offered for sarcophagi’s demythologization this is perhaps the most popular, with a pedigree stretching from Rodenwaldt (1921) to Zanker (2010), yet the argument itself has never been subjected to real scrutiny. It rests on three fundamental assumptions: (1) that Christians did actually purchase neutral/mythless ‘pagan’ sarcophagi for their own use; (2) that they did so in numbers sufficient to affect the repertoire of pieces that pagan workshops produced; and (3) that Christians continued to buy neutral sarcophagi even after Christian ones were available. For critical traction on these assumptions this paper turns to a close examination of the surviving monuments themselves, supplemented by social scientific reconstructions of Christian expansion and purchasing power. It argues that the archaeological record offers minimal evidence for Christian purchase of mythless sarcophagi, and that Christian numbers and purchasing power for most of the third century were simply too low to have contributed in any significant fashion to the shift in market production towards demythologized pieces. A nascent Christianity, in conclusion, can have played no real role in the extinction of mythological imagery on Roman sarcophagi.
What, however, of other species of Roman artworks, such as carved relief sarcophagi, those objects whose scale of production and sheer cultural visibility overwhelms every other artistic genre of the third and fourth centuries? To gain critical leverage, I propose focusing on a particular subgenre of these coffins: the hugely popular Season sarcophagi. These make an ideal test case, not just because of their characteristic repetition of near-identical personifications of the Seasons (usually four, but sometimes as many as eight) along the face of the frieze, but because the cyclical nature of the Seasons already implies (chronological) movement and passage. This paper examines to what extent such Season sarcophagi employ the reiterated figures of the Seasons to translate this chronological movement into spatial terms, pulling the viewer along (and perhaps even around) the coffin in time with the Seasons themselves. This in turn requires addressing several intersecting questions: Are Season sarcophagi more likely to assume a rounded shape than a rectilinear one? What do we make of those which change the order of the Seasons? Under what conditions can their number be reduced to two, or increased to eight? And how does the movement implied by the cyclical iteration of the Seasons sit with the static compositions of most other late Roman artworks, such as the frieze on the Arch of Constantine, which employs masses of repeated figures to instead stifle movement and fix all attention on the central hieratic figure? The goal of this paper is an improved understanding of how repetition functions in late Roman art, its capacity to alternatively spur or cripple movement, and its occasional clash with the formal requirements of various genres.
This central yet under-analyzed convention, which structures the depiction of the dead on almost every metropolitan Roman sarcophagus of the third century, has yet to be adequately theorized. To reconstruct its significance and trace its logic I suggest picking the phenomenon up at both ends, examining both its genesis in the late second century (which requires highlighting its unexpected departure from the conventions of contemporary imperial and private portraiture in the round), and its cessation in the early fourth (which demands addressing why pagan sarcophagi should cling to the convention until the very end of their production, when Christian sarcophagi abandon it a generation before). The results: what began as simply a means of identifying and isolating the deceased within a composition quickly gained currency as an affirmation of the fundamental gap separating mere mortals from mythic and divine figures, and was only abandoned as a new religion claimed to close this gap. The history of the chisel/drill distinction in Roman funerary carving was thus intimately tied to the changing fortunes of pagan polytheism, whose central ontological divide, between mortal and immortal, it had given visual form.
Often overlooked in discussion of the frieze are data provided by Pindar, Pausanias, and Corinthian coinage: that Athena herself invented the bridle, and -- under the names of Athena Chalinitis and Athena Hippia -- even received cult on this account. Close attention to the frieze’s imagery of taming and bridling, combined with technical analysis of the Parthenon’s extensive yet selective use of added bronze to highlight reins and bridles, reveals an artistic program which conspicuously thematizes the goddess’s civilizing gift.
I suggest that a close reading of the so-called ‘Lycian Sarcophagus’, unearthed at the royal necropolis of Sidon in 1887, may help to expand our interpretive options when confronted with objects of apparently mixed artistic pedigree. Attending to both iconography and political history, I propose that the monument’s deployment of Greek, Persian, and other elements was carefully orchestrated to speak to, and flatter, at least two different ethnic audiences, so that this most cosmopolitan of mercantile cities could proclaim its important role in the international arena of the fifth century while ensuring that it would offend neither victor nor vanquished. I end by developing the methodological implications: rather than a passive product of cultural interaction, artistic mixture in the Eastern Mediterranean sometimes represented a highly calculated political strategy, adopted when an object intended for state display had to reckon with disparate (and frequently hostile) viewing communities.
Colloquia Organized & Chaired by Mont Allen
Sadly, the study of forgeries has gained new urgency on other grounds, thanks to current events in the Middle East. Knowing that their objects are less likely to be spotted when they can be slipped into a market flush with real illicit antiquities, forgers prefer to work in the wake of widespread looting. As a result, the recent wholesale plundering of sites in Egypt, and the likelihood of similar occurrences in Libya, makes a rash of future forgeries lamentably likely.
The time thus seems ripe for a colloquium session devoted to this rich yet distressing topic. Our papers have been selected not only for their cultural coverage (Greek, Roman, and Etruscan) and the variety of media addressed (gold jewelry, wall paintings, carved gems, marble sculptures, bronze figurines, and even medical instruments), but also for the range of issues raised. Two of our papers treat the various tools available for ferreting out fakes: Richard De Puma’s “A Gold Pectoral in the Metropolitan Museum of Art” tests those appropriate to Etruscan jewelry, while Kenneth Lapatin’s “Little Big Lies: Forgeries of Ancient Gems” does the same for engraved stones from the Greek and Roman worlds. Our other three take a step backward, examining the various ways in which forgeries are packaged to meet the expectations of scholars and the desires of collectors: Laure Marest-Caffey’s “Artful Deceptions: The Comte de Caylus, Winckelmann, and Forged Roman Wall Paintings” looks at how forgers of frescoes crafted their works to appeal to contemporary luminaries in the 18th century; Jessica Powers’s “Dubitanda on Display: Roman Sculptures and Authenticity in the Museum” does the same for 19th- and 20th-century forgeries of ancient marbles; and Benton Kidd’s “Real Fakes, Fake Fakes, and Authenticating Marbles by Isotopic Analysis” tackles the problems raised by objects which were not manufactured to deceive, but which later found themselves rebranded as genuine antiquities.
This is what our colloquium session aims to provide. Our first three papers demonstrate novel methods for examining the role of wall painting in the public realm: Michael Anderson’s “The Spatial and Visual Context of Pompeian Wall Painting” uses Geographical Information Systems to reconstruct the full architectural environment of several houses in order to reveal which walls would and would not have been visible to particular visitors and inhabitants, and the effect this had on their decoration. Molly Swetnam-Burland’s “Isis, Io, and Ovid’s Syrinx” attends to both literary and archaeological remains to illuminate the fresco cycle decorating one of Pompeii’s famous monuments, the Temple of Isis. And Stephanie Pearson’s “An Un-Augustan Understanding of the Third Style” applies a critical eye to proposed parallels between private painting, public monuments, and the emperor’s political programs. Our final two papers turn to an intimate private sphere, offering fresh interpretations of some of the most familiar yet problematic murals to come from Pompeii: Seth Estrin’s “Dining with the Mysteries” presents a hardheaded discussion of the Villa of the Mysteries, arguing for a revision of overly fanciful interpretations which have misconstrued the novelty and strangeness of its frieze, while Verity Platt’s “Agamemnon’s Grief” explores the close relationship between certain puzzling aspects of Roman rhetoric and a popular set of artistic motifs known from the House of the Tragic Poet and other Pompeian houses.
Our first two papers focus on the symbolic associations accorded materials themselves: Alessandra Giumlia-Mair’s “The Symbolic Significance of Metals and Alloys” documents how Greek and Roman metallurgists creating composite statues selected alloys not only for their working properties (as we might expect), but also for their symbolic associations; while Alexis Castor’s “Gilding the Lily” shows how changes in the cultural significance of both gold and animals during the Persian and Hellenistic periods shaped their intersection in jewelry. The other three focus on the significance of technique: Kenneth Lapatin’s “Intaglio to Cameo” details how the rarity of appropriate material for cameos, combined with the more exacting techniques of carving they required, affected their iconography and status vis-à-vis intaglios; Stephanie Pearson’s “From the (Back)ground Up” examines how the distinctive Gandharan method of relief carving led its sculptors to favor certain compositions and subject matter; and Peter Schultz’s “The Politics of Erasing Facture” demonstrates how erasing toolmarks and other traces of facture from stone sculpture could itself carry a political message.
Taken as a group, then, our papers cover five of the most important genres of artistic production in antiquity, and illustrate the manifold ways in which ancient craftsmen and viewers — both Greek and Roman, Persian and Gandharan — accorded meaning to material facture itself.
it for well over a century. This alone should grant them a central position within the scholarship on Roman archaeology and art history. Yet the last half century has seen them relegated to the periphery of the field, a specialist domain where few venture.
Thankfully the wind is shifting. Recent monographs by Michael Koortbojian, Bjoern Ewald, and Paul Zanker have propelled mythological sarcophagi back into the spotlight, reminding material and cultural historian alike of their centrality for understanding the High and Late Empire. In celebration of the program committee’s call for papers on funerary art, we are proud to offer a colloquium which gathers North America’s sarcophagus specialists for a series of papers showcasing their most recent work.
The presentations are intended to display something of the range of possible methodological approaches to the material. Our first paper, by Bjoern Ewald (“Blood, Death, and Myth on Roman Sarcophagi”) explores the funerary function of myth on Roman coffins by investigating those mythological scenes which advertise their own internal funerary context. Our second paper, by Kathryn McDonnell (“Inappropriate Myths: Inscribed Text and Sculpted Myth on Roman Sarcophagi”) gains critical leverage on the repertoire of carved scenes through epigraphical analysis of their accompanying inscriptions. Our third, by Sinclair Bell (“Dionysus at the Circus: Scenes of Spectacle and Myth on Roman Sarcophagi and Related Monuments”) demonstrates how judicious comparison with non-funerary works can elucidate otherwise opaque imagery. Our fourth, by Francesco de Angelis (“Unique Emotions? Roman Sarcophagi in a Comparative PerspectiveÓ”) extends the comparative approach, juxtaposing Roman and Etruscan pieces in order to bring out the social specificity of each. And our fifth, by Mont Allen (“Drilling the Dead? Separating Mythological and Mortal on Roman Sarcopagi”) considers how Roman sculptors used chisel and drill to mark out mythic figures, turning technique itself into a conveyer of iconographic content.
Our colloquium concludes with discussion by our respondent, Michael Koortbojian.
varied methodological approaches, from technical analysis and iconography to epigraphy and mythography. With this in mind our colloquium strives for topological rather than methodological unity, showcasing three pairs of papers chosen for their topical resonance and mutual illumination of common themes.
Our first pair of papers — Catherine Keesling’s “A Phantom Acropolis Dedication? Kresilas' Idomeneus (Poseidippos P.Mil.Vogl. AB 64)” and Stephanie Pearsons’s “The Acropolis Anacreon and Athenian Claims to Ionia” — are devoted to freestanding sculpture. While the former shows how careful attention to base inscriptions and epigrams can help in the reconstruction of lost works (in this case, one by Kresilas), the latter attends to political history and contemporary drama to reconstruct the reception of another dedication commonly attributed to the same sculptor.
Our second pair — Rebecca Karberg’s “Images of Aglauros from the Athenian Acropolis” and Maggie Clark’s “Weaver and Warrior: Relating the Two Main Themes of the Parthenon Sculptures to Athena and the Athenians” — address the theme of mothers and wives, showing why the negotiation of virginity and maternity was a peculiarly site-specific problematic. The first examines the Erechtheion, Parthenon, and objects scattered over the Acropolis for images of Aglauros and her sisters (those unwed mothers turned wives in Athenian myth); the second considers their non-mythical counterparts, the images of married Athenian women on the Parthenon’s east frieze, and makes sense of them through the chaste figure of Athena herself.
If these first four focus on freestanding sculpture and material drawn from across the Acropolis, our third pair — Mont Allen’s “Bridled in Bronze: The Prominence of the Horse on the Parthenon Frieze” and Peter Schultz’s “The Athenian Apobates Race and the Iconography of the Parthenon’s West Pediment” — are dedicated to the Parthenon itself. Pursuing cavalcade and chariot race, both papers interrogate the frieze’s odd fondness for equine motifs, and both demonstrate how attention to these motifs reveals a west pediment carefully integrated into the sculptural program established by the frieze itself.
Our respondent, Andrew Stewart, concludes our colloquium by contributing his own perspectives on these topics, drawing on his own work on epigrams and reception theory, gender, and programmatic ensembles within Greek sculpture.
ORGANIZED SESSIONS by Mont Allen
Papers by Mont Allen
The solution developed by Roman carvers was to separate these figures through the tooling of their hairdos: while the hair of mythic figures was extensively drilled, that of the deceased was rendered solely with the chisel. This article examines how Roman sculptors thus invested sculptural technique itself with semantic meaning, as a contrast in tools and toolmarks was pressed into service as a language for artiiculating the ontological status – and with it, the representational function – of the various figures arrayed on the coffin.
Statistical analysis of the roughly 400 extant bucolic sarcophagi reveals definite patterns in the imagery, with a marked preference for depicting certain types of animals, landscapes, and activities over others: purely pastoral scenes heavily outweigh the small number that incorporate agricultural activities; and among the former, sheep and, to a lesser extent, goats are far more commonly depicted than cattle or horses. Gaining critical leverage on these patterns requires reconstructing the set of associations and assumptions that Roman viewers would have brought to bear on these pieces. Here I marshal a variety of evidence, both literary (the writings of Livy and Cato on the tension between farming and herding; Varro’s treatise on agricultural practices; the rural social hierarchies related in the *Vita Donati*) and archaeological (the booming construction of great *horrea* in major cities during the second century; the ongoing shift in Italy’s rural economy towards agricultural over pastoral yield; bucolic motifs on Roman coinage). The resulting picture makes it clear that -- contrary to the most commonly accepted theory for their popularity -- the scenes on bucolic sarcophagi were pointedly *not* intended to evoke the rural estates dotting the Roman countryside, nor did they mean to index the villas of Rome’s Senatorial class. They strove, rather, to conjure up the romantic, hazy, and exoticized landscape of the Arcadian pastoral idyll, an atmosphere thickly Greek. In abstract terms, these findings force us to rethink the third-century disappearance of mythological imagery from metropolitan sarcophagi. They also, however, provide concrete traction in the ongoing debate over sarcophagi’s clientele, allowing us to specify which classes and social groups were indeed the intended market for these elaborate coffins.
Was it perhaps driven by a burgeoning Christian faith? To put it more succinctly, was mythological relief a casualty of Christianization? This explanation proposes that sarcophagi featuring seasons, shepherds, philosophers, and hunters gained in popularity because their imagery was religiously neutral and thus capable of appealing to both old pagan and new Christian clientele alike, a flexibility that the older mythological sarcophagi did not have. To be mythless meant to be non-affiliated, and thus palatable to all. In a time of religious transformation -- which for funerary art always means a time of market transformation -- this, so the argument goes, was a selling point.
Of all the explanations commonly offered for sarcophagi’s demythologization this is perhaps the most popular, with a pedigree stretching from Rodenwaldt (1921) to Zanker (2010), yet the argument itself has never been subjected to real scrutiny. It rests on three fundamental assumptions: (1) that Christians did actually purchase neutral/mythless ‘pagan’ sarcophagi for their own use; (2) that they did so in numbers sufficient to affect the repertoire of pieces that pagan workshops produced; and (3) that Christians continued to buy neutral sarcophagi even after Christian ones were available. For critical traction on these assumptions this paper turns to a close examination of the surviving monuments themselves, supplemented by social scientific reconstructions of Christian expansion and purchasing power. It argues that the archaeological record offers minimal evidence for Christian purchase of mythless sarcophagi, and that Christian numbers and purchasing power for most of the third century were simply too low to have contributed in any significant fashion to the shift in market production towards demythologized pieces. A nascent Christianity, in conclusion, can have played no real role in the extinction of mythological imagery on Roman sarcophagi.
What, however, of other species of Roman artworks, such as carved relief sarcophagi, those objects whose scale of production and sheer cultural visibility overwhelms every other artistic genre of the third and fourth centuries? To gain critical leverage, I propose focusing on a particular subgenre of these coffins: the hugely popular Season sarcophagi. These make an ideal test case, not just because of their characteristic repetition of near-identical personifications of the Seasons (usually four, but sometimes as many as eight) along the face of the frieze, but because the cyclical nature of the Seasons already implies (chronological) movement and passage. This paper examines to what extent such Season sarcophagi employ the reiterated figures of the Seasons to translate this chronological movement into spatial terms, pulling the viewer along (and perhaps even around) the coffin in time with the Seasons themselves. This in turn requires addressing several intersecting questions: Are Season sarcophagi more likely to assume a rounded shape than a rectilinear one? What do we make of those which change the order of the Seasons? Under what conditions can their number be reduced to two, or increased to eight? And how does the movement implied by the cyclical iteration of the Seasons sit with the static compositions of most other late Roman artworks, such as the frieze on the Arch of Constantine, which employs masses of repeated figures to instead stifle movement and fix all attention on the central hieratic figure? The goal of this paper is an improved understanding of how repetition functions in late Roman art, its capacity to alternatively spur or cripple movement, and its occasional clash with the formal requirements of various genres.
This central yet under-analyzed convention, which structures the depiction of the dead on almost every metropolitan Roman sarcophagus of the third century, has yet to be adequately theorized. To reconstruct its significance and trace its logic I suggest picking the phenomenon up at both ends, examining both its genesis in the late second century (which requires highlighting its unexpected departure from the conventions of contemporary imperial and private portraiture in the round), and its cessation in the early fourth (which demands addressing why pagan sarcophagi should cling to the convention until the very end of their production, when Christian sarcophagi abandon it a generation before). The results: what began as simply a means of identifying and isolating the deceased within a composition quickly gained currency as an affirmation of the fundamental gap separating mere mortals from mythic and divine figures, and was only abandoned as a new religion claimed to close this gap. The history of the chisel/drill distinction in Roman funerary carving was thus intimately tied to the changing fortunes of pagan polytheism, whose central ontological divide, between mortal and immortal, it had given visual form.
Often overlooked in discussion of the frieze are data provided by Pindar, Pausanias, and Corinthian coinage: that Athena herself invented the bridle, and -- under the names of Athena Chalinitis and Athena Hippia -- even received cult on this account. Close attention to the frieze’s imagery of taming and bridling, combined with technical analysis of the Parthenon’s extensive yet selective use of added bronze to highlight reins and bridles, reveals an artistic program which conspicuously thematizes the goddess’s civilizing gift.
I suggest that a close reading of the so-called ‘Lycian Sarcophagus’, unearthed at the royal necropolis of Sidon in 1887, may help to expand our interpretive options when confronted with objects of apparently mixed artistic pedigree. Attending to both iconography and political history, I propose that the monument’s deployment of Greek, Persian, and other elements was carefully orchestrated to speak to, and flatter, at least two different ethnic audiences, so that this most cosmopolitan of mercantile cities could proclaim its important role in the international arena of the fifth century while ensuring that it would offend neither victor nor vanquished. I end by developing the methodological implications: rather than a passive product of cultural interaction, artistic mixture in the Eastern Mediterranean sometimes represented a highly calculated political strategy, adopted when an object intended for state display had to reckon with disparate (and frequently hostile) viewing communities.
Sadly, the study of forgeries has gained new urgency on other grounds, thanks to current events in the Middle East. Knowing that their objects are less likely to be spotted when they can be slipped into a market flush with real illicit antiquities, forgers prefer to work in the wake of widespread looting. As a result, the recent wholesale plundering of sites in Egypt, and the likelihood of similar occurrences in Libya, makes a rash of future forgeries lamentably likely.
The time thus seems ripe for a colloquium session devoted to this rich yet distressing topic. Our papers have been selected not only for their cultural coverage (Greek, Roman, and Etruscan) and the variety of media addressed (gold jewelry, wall paintings, carved gems, marble sculptures, bronze figurines, and even medical instruments), but also for the range of issues raised. Two of our papers treat the various tools available for ferreting out fakes: Richard De Puma’s “A Gold Pectoral in the Metropolitan Museum of Art” tests those appropriate to Etruscan jewelry, while Kenneth Lapatin’s “Little Big Lies: Forgeries of Ancient Gems” does the same for engraved stones from the Greek and Roman worlds. Our other three take a step backward, examining the various ways in which forgeries are packaged to meet the expectations of scholars and the desires of collectors: Laure Marest-Caffey’s “Artful Deceptions: The Comte de Caylus, Winckelmann, and Forged Roman Wall Paintings” looks at how forgers of frescoes crafted their works to appeal to contemporary luminaries in the 18th century; Jessica Powers’s “Dubitanda on Display: Roman Sculptures and Authenticity in the Museum” does the same for 19th- and 20th-century forgeries of ancient marbles; and Benton Kidd’s “Real Fakes, Fake Fakes, and Authenticating Marbles by Isotopic Analysis” tackles the problems raised by objects which were not manufactured to deceive, but which later found themselves rebranded as genuine antiquities.
This is what our colloquium session aims to provide. Our first three papers demonstrate novel methods for examining the role of wall painting in the public realm: Michael Anderson’s “The Spatial and Visual Context of Pompeian Wall Painting” uses Geographical Information Systems to reconstruct the full architectural environment of several houses in order to reveal which walls would and would not have been visible to particular visitors and inhabitants, and the effect this had on their decoration. Molly Swetnam-Burland’s “Isis, Io, and Ovid’s Syrinx” attends to both literary and archaeological remains to illuminate the fresco cycle decorating one of Pompeii’s famous monuments, the Temple of Isis. And Stephanie Pearson’s “An Un-Augustan Understanding of the Third Style” applies a critical eye to proposed parallels between private painting, public monuments, and the emperor’s political programs. Our final two papers turn to an intimate private sphere, offering fresh interpretations of some of the most familiar yet problematic murals to come from Pompeii: Seth Estrin’s “Dining with the Mysteries” presents a hardheaded discussion of the Villa of the Mysteries, arguing for a revision of overly fanciful interpretations which have misconstrued the novelty and strangeness of its frieze, while Verity Platt’s “Agamemnon’s Grief” explores the close relationship between certain puzzling aspects of Roman rhetoric and a popular set of artistic motifs known from the House of the Tragic Poet and other Pompeian houses.
Our first two papers focus on the symbolic associations accorded materials themselves: Alessandra Giumlia-Mair’s “The Symbolic Significance of Metals and Alloys” documents how Greek and Roman metallurgists creating composite statues selected alloys not only for their working properties (as we might expect), but also for their symbolic associations; while Alexis Castor’s “Gilding the Lily” shows how changes in the cultural significance of both gold and animals during the Persian and Hellenistic periods shaped their intersection in jewelry. The other three focus on the significance of technique: Kenneth Lapatin’s “Intaglio to Cameo” details how the rarity of appropriate material for cameos, combined with the more exacting techniques of carving they required, affected their iconography and status vis-à-vis intaglios; Stephanie Pearson’s “From the (Back)ground Up” examines how the distinctive Gandharan method of relief carving led its sculptors to favor certain compositions and subject matter; and Peter Schultz’s “The Politics of Erasing Facture” demonstrates how erasing toolmarks and other traces of facture from stone sculpture could itself carry a political message.
Taken as a group, then, our papers cover five of the most important genres of artistic production in antiquity, and illustrate the manifold ways in which ancient craftsmen and viewers — both Greek and Roman, Persian and Gandharan — accorded meaning to material facture itself.
it for well over a century. This alone should grant them a central position within the scholarship on Roman archaeology and art history. Yet the last half century has seen them relegated to the periphery of the field, a specialist domain where few venture.
Thankfully the wind is shifting. Recent monographs by Michael Koortbojian, Bjoern Ewald, and Paul Zanker have propelled mythological sarcophagi back into the spotlight, reminding material and cultural historian alike of their centrality for understanding the High and Late Empire. In celebration of the program committee’s call for papers on funerary art, we are proud to offer a colloquium which gathers North America’s sarcophagus specialists for a series of papers showcasing their most recent work.
The presentations are intended to display something of the range of possible methodological approaches to the material. Our first paper, by Bjoern Ewald (“Blood, Death, and Myth on Roman Sarcophagi”) explores the funerary function of myth on Roman coffins by investigating those mythological scenes which advertise their own internal funerary context. Our second paper, by Kathryn McDonnell (“Inappropriate Myths: Inscribed Text and Sculpted Myth on Roman Sarcophagi”) gains critical leverage on the repertoire of carved scenes through epigraphical analysis of their accompanying inscriptions. Our third, by Sinclair Bell (“Dionysus at the Circus: Scenes of Spectacle and Myth on Roman Sarcophagi and Related Monuments”) demonstrates how judicious comparison with non-funerary works can elucidate otherwise opaque imagery. Our fourth, by Francesco de Angelis (“Unique Emotions? Roman Sarcophagi in a Comparative PerspectiveÓ”) extends the comparative approach, juxtaposing Roman and Etruscan pieces in order to bring out the social specificity of each. And our fifth, by Mont Allen (“Drilling the Dead? Separating Mythological and Mortal on Roman Sarcopagi”) considers how Roman sculptors used chisel and drill to mark out mythic figures, turning technique itself into a conveyer of iconographic content.
Our colloquium concludes with discussion by our respondent, Michael Koortbojian.
varied methodological approaches, from technical analysis and iconography to epigraphy and mythography. With this in mind our colloquium strives for topological rather than methodological unity, showcasing three pairs of papers chosen for their topical resonance and mutual illumination of common themes.
Our first pair of papers — Catherine Keesling’s “A Phantom Acropolis Dedication? Kresilas' Idomeneus (Poseidippos P.Mil.Vogl. AB 64)” and Stephanie Pearsons’s “The Acropolis Anacreon and Athenian Claims to Ionia” — are devoted to freestanding sculpture. While the former shows how careful attention to base inscriptions and epigrams can help in the reconstruction of lost works (in this case, one by Kresilas), the latter attends to political history and contemporary drama to reconstruct the reception of another dedication commonly attributed to the same sculptor.
Our second pair — Rebecca Karberg’s “Images of Aglauros from the Athenian Acropolis” and Maggie Clark’s “Weaver and Warrior: Relating the Two Main Themes of the Parthenon Sculptures to Athena and the Athenians” — address the theme of mothers and wives, showing why the negotiation of virginity and maternity was a peculiarly site-specific problematic. The first examines the Erechtheion, Parthenon, and objects scattered over the Acropolis for images of Aglauros and her sisters (those unwed mothers turned wives in Athenian myth); the second considers their non-mythical counterparts, the images of married Athenian women on the Parthenon’s east frieze, and makes sense of them through the chaste figure of Athena herself.
If these first four focus on freestanding sculpture and material drawn from across the Acropolis, our third pair — Mont Allen’s “Bridled in Bronze: The Prominence of the Horse on the Parthenon Frieze” and Peter Schultz’s “The Athenian Apobates Race and the Iconography of the Parthenon’s West Pediment” — are dedicated to the Parthenon itself. Pursuing cavalcade and chariot race, both papers interrogate the frieze’s odd fondness for equine motifs, and both demonstrate how attention to these motifs reveals a west pediment carefully integrated into the sculptural program established by the frieze itself.
Our respondent, Andrew Stewart, concludes our colloquium by contributing his own perspectives on these topics, drawing on his own work on epigrams and reception theory, gender, and programmatic ensembles within Greek sculpture.