Читать книгу A History of Roman Art онлайн

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Just a couple more things about the book before we launch into the art. The goal for the Preface, Note to Students, and Introduction is to introduce you both to this book and to provide a brief orientation to Roman art history. The Introduction on Roman art history is designed to provide some examples of the defining qualities of Roman culture and the way art intersects with them. It would, however, be a separate book, actually two of them as Stewart and Hölscher demonstrate below, to write on the Roman social system and the means by which art in the Roman world operated as a symbolic system to convey values. The best takeaway from this is awareness that the Roman world operated with different rules than our own, that those rules need to be learned, and that art can be a key to learning them and to seeing how the Romans reinforced the rules. As you go through the book, you can apply this lesson to the material, asking what it tells us about Roman culture, Roman values, and Roman arts. Then you will have taken a huge step not just toward learning Roman art, but to thinking like an art historian. And that brings us to the art itself and its history and study.