The Aesthetics of Assimilation: Non-Elite Roman Funerary Monuments, 100 B.C.E. - 200 C.E. Público
Stewart, Devon Ashley (2014)
Abstract
Funerary monuments with portraits represent the single largest genre of art commissioned by non-elite Roman patrons, especially manumitted slaves, in the city of Rome from the first century B.C.E. through the Imperial period. With little or no access to other forms of public, monumental self-representation, freedmen used funerary monuments to give shape to their social and commemorative concerns. These concerns revolve primarily around assimilation into Roman society, resolution of the destructive effects of death on the family and community, the preservation of individual and collective memories, and the assertion of status and erudition. This dissertation explores the aesthetic and commemorative strategies deployed in non-elite Roman funerary monuments to achieve these goals. Whereas previous studies have characterized non-elite patrons as passive consumers of elite visual culture who imitate elite models blindly, this dissertation demonstrates that non-elite patrons actively engaged with contemporary social, political, and visual culture in order to create innovative monuments for themselves and their families. Moreover, it privileges the sepulchral context of these monuments in order to reframe the discussion of social status in terms of anxieties over death and the obliteration of freedmen's newly acquired citizenship. Freedmen patrons appropriated the style and iconography of elite visual culture in order to contest the social dominance of the elite, and to assert concomitant claims to legitimacy in Roman society. They utilized aesthetic strategies such as repetition, reproduction, imitation and emulation in ways analogous to the Roman emulation of Greek ideal sculpture, exhibiting a high degree of visual literacy and art historical knowledge. Similarly, they used reproduction to establish a sense of communal or collective identity within their broader social group that endured over the course of centuries. This dissertation refutes the traditional contradistinction between elite and non-elite Roman art, instead emphasizing the concordances in the patrons' artistic and self-representational intrestes.
Table of Contents
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION 1
CHAPTER 1: REPRESENTATION AND VIEWING IN AN ESCHATOLOGICAL FRAMEWORK 13
TYPES OF VIEWING 16
VIEWING AND REPRESENTATION 20
RETROSPECTIVE IMAGES AND COMMEMORATION 23
ANTICIPATORY IMAGES AND PHANTASIA 33
RETROSPECTION, ANTICIPATION AND CONTINUATION 36
CONCLUSION 40
CHAPTER 2: NON-ELITE TOMB MONUMENTS AND THE MYTH OF THE "FREEDMAN AESTHETIC" 43
"ELITE" AND "NON-ELITE" IN ANCIENT ROME 46
ANCIENT AND MODERN PERSPECTIVES 59
CONCLUSION 73
CHAPTER 3: MORIBUS NON MAIORIBUS: IMAGES, ANCESTORS AND FREEDMEN AT THE END
OF THE ROMAN REPUBLIC 76
ANCESTORS AND IMAGES 77
NEW MEN AND THE "IDEOLOGY OF NOVITAS" 88
PORTRAIT AND LIKENESS 100
CONCLUSION 110
CHAPTER 4: IMITATION AND REPLICATION AS AESTHETIC STRATEGIES IN
NON-ELITE FUNERARY MONUMENTS 112
KOPIENKRITIK AND ITS LEGACY 115
REPETITION AND REPRODUCTION IN PORTRAITURE 118
EMULATION AND IMITATION 126
REPRODUCTIONS OF IDEAL SCULPTURE 146
CONCLUSION 174
CHAPTER 5: THE AESTHETIC AND SOCIAL FUNCTIONS OF REPETITION IN NON-ELITE
TOMB MONUMENTS 178
EARLY DIVERSITY IN NON-ELITE FUNERARY MONUMENTS 179
FORMULA AND REPETITION 187
CONTINUITY THROUGH THE IMPERIAL PERIOD 197
A MODEST REVIVAL 202
CONCLUSION 213
CONCLUSION 216
FIGURES 221
BIBLIOGRAPHY 242
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