Читать книгу A History of Roman Art онлайн

23 страница из 48

This means that the visual messages projected by the art and architecture of the Roman world carry a critical set of information allowing the Romans to understand and navigate their world, goals you have as well. It matters because art represented the way people across the Roman Empire communicated their ideas, values, beliefs, and identities. These were all embedded in the art and could be unpacked by a Roman, and sometimes intentionally by a non‐Roman, audience, and, with some guidance from this book, by one today as well. And, of course, the subjects and forms they selected are still with us today. Now, about the features in the book and that promised strategy for success.

If you’ll forgive some advice from a stranger, allow me to suggest a plan. When faced with a chapter, consider starting with the timeline and pictures. There are many pictures and, while we encourage you to read every word here, time spent looking at the pictures, truly studying the images of the art itself, is time well spent. Note that the captions each end in the date of the work. With a little practice you can teach yourself to glance down at that and start connecting images and dates from the beginning. So, look first at the timeline and pictures, only after that read the chapter, taking time to glance aside at the definitions in the margin. Finally, ideally following a class in which the material is covered, return to a visual review by looking at the pictures a second time. About those pictures: you should know that there is an inherent tension in the selection of images for each chapter and thus period. The tension is between works of art that are representative of art in the everyday Roman world and those that are cutting edge, leading to trends that will be developed in later periods or places. What you have before you is a mix of these two groups. It’s not all about the pictures though; we want you to read the text. To aid you in that we have created the marginal glossary as well as a number of sidebars and box features. These are pulled out to give them special emphasis and although it would be easy to skip them and just keep skimming the main text, you’ll find that stopping to read them will help your understanding of the main text.