Beyond Boundaries: Connecting Visual Cultures in the Provinces of Ancient Rome ed. by Susan E. Alcock, Mariana Egri, James F. D. Frakes (review)
Rent from DeepDyve- Beyond Boundaries: Connecting Visual Cultures in the Provinces of Ancient Rome ed. by Susan E. Alcock, Mariana Egri, James F. D. Frakes
(Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2016), 386 pp.
The Roman empire encompassed all of Europe (except the north), along with the Near East into Asia, North Africa, and Egypt. The Roman arts derived from those of classical Greece, but the artists’ aims were more ambitious and practical. They affirmed the universality of Roman rule and the privileges of Roman citizenship. They disseminated information about the empire, political and military (notably on coins). They assimilated local images and artistic conventions, from Celtic to Egyptian, without abandoning their “classical” style, and their heritage is perceptible still today, carried by the Renaissance and neoclassicism. Modern arts either follow it or try consciously to fight it. Trafalgar Square, the latest portrait of Queen Elizabeth, the White House, are all “Roman,” and even the “modern” succumbs in details. Figures are natural or naturalistic, and ornament defined by strict geometry. Nineteen authors (at a Getty Center conference) discuss various aspects of Roman classicism in parts of the empire, doing so mainly in an old style of scholarship: the effect of color (lost) on statuary, which was a (re)discovery of the last generation, is generally ignored, and the Roman world appreciated color no less than the Greek did.
The choice of examples here is rich yet could easily be multiplied—for example, by a Syrian (Palmyrene) type of gravestone erected by a Roman for his Syrian wife in Scotland. The phenomenon is unique in the ancient world. Even the more or less uniform arts of the early Americas barely compete, and although widespread, south and north, the pre-Columbian arts lack the uniformity of language and imperial control. What we are offered in this collection of essays may not always be Roman art at its best, but certainly it is Roman art at its most communicative.
Sir John Boardman is Lincoln Professor of Classical Art and Archaeology emeritus at Oxford University and a fellow of the British Academy, which awarded him its Kenyon Medal in 1995. Editor of the Oxford History of Classical Art, his other books include The Greeks in Asia; The Diffusion of Classical Art in Antiquity; The Greeks Overseas; The Triumph of Dionysos; The History of Greek Vases; and The Relief Plaques of Eastern Eurasia and China: The “Ordos Bronzes,” Peter the Great’s Treasure, and their Kin. He received the inaugural Onassis International Prize for Humanities in 2009.
