‘Unfinished portrait heads’ on later Roman sarcophagi: some new perspectives

Huskinson, Janet

doi:10.1017/s0068246200004256

Cited by 4 publications

(4 citation statements)

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“…In this, the reliefs of the arch emulate traditions of the honorific reuse of statues (Blanck, 1969;Jucker, 1981 (on an earlier period)), as well as the leaving of unfinished heads and the later insertion of portrait heads into mythological scenes common in non-imperial Roman art (Huskinson, 1998), for example on sarcophagi like the splendid Ludovisi sarcophagus now in the Palazzo Altemps in Rome (L. de Lachenal in Giuliano, 1983: 56-67). 31 Here a mythological or a battle scene of a fairly standardized type has the portrait of the deceased inserted in the figure of the main protagonist -who is simultaneously commemorated through his portrait and elevated by virtue of the grand military or mythical narrative in which he figures.…”

Section: Past and Presentmentioning

confidence: 97%

From the culture ofspoliato the cult of relics: the Arch of Constantine and the genesis of late antique forms

Elsner¹

2000

Pap. Br. Sch. Rome

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DALLA CULTURA DEGLISPOLIAAL CULTO DELLE RELIQUIE: L'ARCO DI COSTANTINO E LA GENESI DELLE FORME TARDO ANTICHEQuesto articolo cerca di esaminare il programma dell'arco di Costantino, ed in particolare il suo riuso dispoliadi precedenti edifici, alia luce di cosa possa essere ricostruito dei più tardi progetti monumentali di Costantino a Costantinopoli. Viene ipotizzata la spoliazione di statue classiche (usate per decorare gli spazi pubblici della nuova città) e delle reliquie apostoliche, le quali vennero utilizzate nelle tombe collocate a fianco di quella di Costantino nel mausoleo dei Santi Apostoli, o durante la vita dell'imperatore stesso o di quella del figlio Costanzo. L'uso di arcaismi poetici, nella loro tipica forma poetica del quarto secolo (quale quella di Cento), viene anche dimostrato. Si sostiene che l'arco di Costantino emerge come un monumento chiave nella genesi di una nuova estetica costantiniana in cui l'antico viene incorporato nel moderno, ed in questo modo inevitabilmente trasformato.

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Section: Past and Presentmentioning

confidence: 97%

From the culture ofspoliato the cult of relics: the Arch of Constantine and the genesis of late antique forms

Elsner¹

2000

Pap. Br. Sch. Rome

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“…24;Dütschke 1875: 129-32, no. 316;Heilmeyer 1987;Blome 1990;Zanker and Ewald 2012: 44-6, 303-6;Reinsberg 2006: 26-9, 192, no. 6;Newby 2016: 287-91.…”

Section: Death By Analogyunclassified

“…See also Zanker and Ewald 2012: 39–44. For further discussion of portraits on sarcophagi and what they do for death, see Huskinson 1998: 131; Platt 2011: 377–84; Elsner 2012a: 179–80; Platt 2017: 379–80.…”

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confidence: 99%

Death by Analogy: Identity Crises on a Roman Sarcophagus

Clifford

2023

J. Rom. Stud.

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This article examines how images on a sarcophagus involved Roman viewers in processes of thinking by analogy and so invited them to engage in meditation on death. This more thanatological slant is sidelined in current approaches that emphasise how exemplary figures on sarcophagi consoled the bereaved and praised the dead. Building on these approaches, together with work on the mediating role played by artefacts in thought, this article proposes that analogies on sarcophagi also invited the living to think about their own death and the possibilities and limitations of analogy for thanatological reflection. It argues, further, that sarcophagi should be read more expansively, allowing for figures and scenes to have more than one identity rather than collapsing them into one: this multiplicity reinforces meditation on death. The article focuses on Roman sarcophagi that feature Adonis, with emphasis on the Rinuccini sarcophagus; this unusual sarcophagus explicitly juxtaposes real-life and mythological scenes.

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“…On blank heads, seeEngemann 1973, 76-78;Andreae 1984;Huskinson 1998; Birk 2013, 55-58; Russell 2013, 301-307; Elsner forthcoming a. 14 On funerary display and context, see Borg 2013, 213-240; Meinecke 2014; Huskinson 2015, 63-73.…”

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confidence: 99%

Ornament, figure and mise en abyme on Roman sarcophagi

Elsner¹

2018

Ornament and Figure in Graeco-Roman Art

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Figure and ornament are two elements of Roman art endlessly repeated across the many media and genres of Roman image-making.1 This process of replication and the multifarious ways it is used for decorative embellishment, means that it is rather artificial to separate the two.2 When there are paintings or reliefs that adorn the surfaces of monuments (exteriors, interiors, fronts, sides and backs -with the decision not to adorn any one face in itself decoratively significant), both figure and ornament are intrinsic parts of an empire-wide visual system that makes all kinds of replicative claims to collective culture, identity, sovereignty and power.3The role of replication in Roman art is one of the oldest, and currently still one of the hottest, topics in the subject. From the great fields of Meisterforschung and Kopienkritik of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century (which over-emphasised Roman secondariness in relation to the priority of lost Greek models), to the new early twenty-first-century orthodoxy of 'emulation' (which preserves the Roman-* I am particularly grateful to the volume's editors -Michael Squire and Nikolaus Dietrich -as well as to Mont Allen, Bjoern Ewald, Janet Huskinson and Katharina Meinecke for their many helpful suggestions. 1 By 'ornament' I mean here non-figural decorative framing -at any rate, in much of Roman art. For discussion of the historiography, cf. Squire's introduction to this volume -with Neer's chapter in particular. On the distinctive language of Roman ornamenta, see Barham's chapter in this volume, along with the contributions by Platt, Reinhardt and Trimble. 2 I have deliberately put this in a low-key and understated way, since this is a short chapter about a few sarcophagi. But let me be clear: it constitutes a fundamental rejection of the assumptions formulated by Immanuel Kant about parerga, 'ornaments' that function 'externally as a complement' to the main thing 'for example, the frames of pictures or the draperies of statues or the colonnades around palaces' (

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‘Unfinished portrait heads’ on later Roman sarcophagi: some new perspectives

Cited by 4 publications

References 8 publications

From the culture ofspoliato the cult of relics: the Arch of Constantine and the genesis of late antique forms

From the culture ofspoliato the cult of relics: the Arch of Constantine and the genesis of late antique forms

Death by Analogy: Identity Crises on a Roman Sarcophagus

Ornament, figure and mise en abyme on Roman sarcophagi

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