Читать книгу A History of Roman Art онлайн

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Roman art can be seen, despite the style of a particular work, as a semantic system that conveys various meanings and values in a visual way. This makes sense in a society covering a vast geographical and cultural area with a very low literacy rate and no better means of mass communication than the visual. The arts helped to create and transmit a Roman cultural identity across the Roman world. The style may or may not be a component of this, but the work can also, through its elements of subject, form, and structure, convey a variety of meanings.

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Photo courtesy Steven L. Tuck.

To many modern viewers the image of a victorious general – the subject is confirmed by the use of a set of body armor as a strut supporting the left leg – might resemble the “after” photo for an exercise program. It seemingly incongruously combines an idealized, youthful, bulky, muscular body with a craggy, lined face with sagging skin and a wrinkled neck. To a Roman observer it indicates two separate sets of artistic conventions, and therefore cultural values, combined in a single work of art. The craggy portrait face is the Italic tradition conveying the qualities of dignity and maturity of the depicted man, while the muscular youthful body shows the Hellenistic Greek heroization of rulers from the Greek world after the death of Alexander the Great. Together, they merge into a new form of Roman portraiture in the first century BCE. The imagery of victory was important in the Roman world and their readiness to adopt Greek conventions demonstrates the fluidity of the Roman system and its basis on the personal choices of subjects, artists, and patrons.