Pub Date : 2010-12-15DOI: 10.1515/9783110216783.189
Z. Newby
The Roman practice of adding portrait heads to the characters on mythological sarcophagi is well known. These faces with their individualised features and period hairstyles gaze out at us from the pages of handbooks and catalogues, giving a vivid impression of the way that Roman lives and deaths could be directly equated with the fates of mythological figures. Yet this very ubiquity begs a question: just how representative of the larger category of Roman mythological sarcophagi are the chests with portrait heads? The aim of this paper is to conduct a close analysis of mythological sarcophagi with portrait heads, to look at what the presence of portraits adds to the mythological scenes and to ask whether they should be seen as simply intensifying the message of a mythological scene or of altering and nuancing it in a particular way. Despite the familiarity of sarcophagi with portrait heads, little analysis of these chests as a group has been done. While readings of some individual pieces suggest that the addition of portrait heads sometimes refocused the meaning of a myth in surprising ways, the prevailing assumption among scholars seems to be that portrait features on sarcophagi merely reinforce the normal message of the mythological subject matter. For many scholars, the portraits simply make explicit a message which may be more muted elsewhere. In Koortbojian’s words ‘all mythological sarcophagi assert analogies; the presence of the portrait features of the deceased merely intensifies and particularizes the monument’s message’. Greater analysis of the sarcophagi with portrait heads might be expected from Henning Wrede’s discussion of images assimilating individuals with particular gods. This discusses a number of mythological sarcophagi alongside statues or reliefs which show individuals in the dress of, or with the attributes of, divine figures. However, Wrede’s focus is necessarily selective, and depends on
{"title":"6. In the Guise of Gods and Heroes: Portrait Heads on Roman Mythological Sarcophagi","authors":"Z. Newby","doi":"10.1515/9783110216783.189","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110216783.189","url":null,"abstract":"The Roman practice of adding portrait heads to the characters on mythological sarcophagi is well known. These faces with their individualised features and period hairstyles gaze out at us from the pages of handbooks and catalogues, giving a vivid impression of the way that Roman lives and deaths could be directly equated with the fates of mythological figures. Yet this very ubiquity begs a question: just how representative of the larger category of Roman mythological sarcophagi are the chests with portrait heads? The aim of this paper is to conduct a close analysis of mythological sarcophagi with portrait heads, to look at what the presence of portraits adds to the mythological scenes and to ask whether they should be seen as simply intensifying the message of a mythological scene or of altering and nuancing it in a particular way. Despite the familiarity of sarcophagi with portrait heads, little analysis of these chests as a group has been done. While readings of some individual pieces suggest that the addition of portrait heads sometimes refocused the meaning of a myth in surprising ways, the prevailing assumption among scholars seems to be that portrait features on sarcophagi merely reinforce the normal message of the mythological subject matter. For many scholars, the portraits simply make explicit a message which may be more muted elsewhere. In Koortbojian’s words ‘all mythological sarcophagi assert analogies; the presence of the portrait features of the deceased merely intensifies and particularizes the monument’s message’. Greater analysis of the sarcophagi with portrait heads might be expected from Henning Wrede’s discussion of images assimilating individuals with particular gods. This discusses a number of mythological sarcophagi alongside statues or reliefs which show individuals in the dress of, or with the attributes of, divine figures. However, Wrede’s focus is necessarily selective, and depends on","PeriodicalId":340893,"journal":{"name":"Life, Death and Representation","volume":"27 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-12-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114631943","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2010-12-15DOI: 10.1515/9783110216783.fm
{"title":"Frontmatter","authors":"","doi":"10.1515/9783110216783.fm","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110216783.fm","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":340893,"journal":{"name":"Life, Death and Representation","volume":"13 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-12-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129858173","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2010-12-15DOI: 10.1515/9783110216783.21
G. Davies
{"title":"1. Before Sarcophagi","authors":"G. Davies","doi":"10.1515/9783110216783.21","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110216783.21","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":340893,"journal":{"name":"Life, Death and Representation","volume":"11 6 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-12-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122350007","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2010-12-15DOI: 10.1515/9783110216783.55
J. Huskinson
{"title":"2. Habent sua fata: Writing life histories of Roman Sarcophagi","authors":"J. Huskinson","doi":"10.1515/9783110216783.55","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110216783.55","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":340893,"journal":{"name":"Life, Death and Representation","volume":"27 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-12-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121483050","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2010-12-15DOI: 10.1515/9783110216783.119
B. Russell
{"title":"4. The Roman Sarcophagus ‘Industry’: a Reconsideration","authors":"B. Russell","doi":"10.1515/9783110216783.119","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110216783.119","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":340893,"journal":{"name":"Life, Death and Representation","volume":"44 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-12-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"120859803","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2010-12-15DOI: 10.1515/9783110216783.337
Dennis E. Trout
Sometime in the late fourth century, a young woman named Bassa was laid to rest in the Catacomb of Praetextatus near the Appian Way, roughly two kilometres outside Rome’s Aurelian walls. Bassa’s marble sarcophagus – ravaged and scattered in time by vandalism and landslide but reassembled in the early twentieth century (Figure 10.1) – now stands in the handbooks as an (anomalous) example of the socalled Bethesda type. Thirteen other representatives of this sarcophagus group are currently known and each of these thirteen, as far as can be determined, presents the same five New Testament scenes in the same order. In every case, as illustrated by well-preserved examples from the Vatican cemetery and the Cathedral of Tarragona (figs. 2 and 3), a central tableau arranged in two registers portrays (at least in its upper half) an episode from the Gospel of John in which Jesus heals a paralytic at Jerusalem’s pool of Bethesda (Jn 5.1–9). On either side of this central panel appear four other standard scenes, two on each side, and these also reference
{"title":"10. Borrowed Verse and Broken Narrative: Agency, Identity, and the (Bethesda) Sarcophagus of Bassa","authors":"Dennis E. Trout","doi":"10.1515/9783110216783.337","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110216783.337","url":null,"abstract":"Sometime in the late fourth century, a young woman named Bassa was laid to rest in the Catacomb of Praetextatus near the Appian Way, roughly two kilometres outside Rome’s Aurelian walls. Bassa’s marble sarcophagus – ravaged and scattered in time by vandalism and landslide but reassembled in the early twentieth century (Figure 10.1) – now stands in the handbooks as an (anomalous) example of the socalled Bethesda type. Thirteen other representatives of this sarcophagus group are currently known and each of these thirteen, as far as can be determined, presents the same five New Testament scenes in the same order. In every case, as illustrated by well-preserved examples from the Vatican cemetery and the Cathedral of Tarragona (figs. 2 and 3), a central tableau arranged in two registers portrays (at least in its upper half) an episode from the Gospel of John in which Jesus heals a paralytic at Jerusalem’s pool of Bethesda (Jn 5.1–9). On either side of this central panel appear four other standard scenes, two on each side, and these also reference","PeriodicalId":340893,"journal":{"name":"Life, Death and Representation","volume":"101 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-12-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128535339","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2010-12-15DOI: 10.1515/9783110216783.261
B. C. Ewald
In the decorated marble sarcophagi, produced in the Roman Empire during the second and third centuries, death became the occasion for significant private expenditure which bears characteristics of what has been called ‘abjection’. Where we might see decay and decomposition, the rotting corpse, we are greeted by a visual feast of immaculate and immortal marble bodies ( Figure 8.1 a-d). The sarcophagus itself in its materiality – the wealth of figures and the richness of its narrative, the splendour of its painting and gilding – becomes a redemption for death and decay, and a principle means in the fight against the threat of oblivion. The making of the sarcophagus can thus be understood as a pious act of substitution in which the integrity of the body is symbolically reinstated. To use a mythological simile that seems fitting to a discussion of sarcophagi depicting the Hippolytos myth, this is much like the way in which Theseus piously pieces together the mangled portions of his son’s dismembered body – corpus fingit – in the horrific last scene of Seneca’s Phaedra. In this play, the integrity of the corpse is regarded as a prerequisite for proper mourning (1261): quam magna lacrimis pars adhuc nostris abest. A later Christian tradition would go the opposite way, reminding us of decay and decomposition in a memento mori that consciously pairs abjection with sublimation and catharsis in its artful representation of withering flesh. This, of course, implies the creation of a new paradox around life and death, and the promise of a very different exchange of bodies – but that is another story. It is not by accident that the emergence of richly decorated sarcophagi during the second century takes place at a time in which concerns about the body intensify, and in which the body becomes a main conduit for discourses
在二世纪和三世纪罗马帝国制作的装饰大理石石棺中，死亡成为了大量私人支出的场合，具有所谓的“落魄”特征。在我们可能看到腐烂和分解的地方，腐烂的尸体，迎接我们的是一场完美无瑕和不朽的大理石尸体的视觉盛宴(图8.1 a-d)。石棺本身的物质性——丰富的人物形象和丰富的叙述，华丽的绘画和镀金——成为对死亡和衰败的救赎，成为与遗忘威胁作斗争的原则手段。因此，石棺的制作可以被理解为一种虔诚的替代行为，在这种行为中，身体的完整性被象征性地恢复了。用一个神话的比喻来描述希波吕托斯神话中的石棺，这很像塞内加的《费德拉》中可怕的最后一幕中，忒修斯虔诚地把他儿子被肢解的身体的各个部分拼凑起来的方式。在这部戏剧中，尸体的完整性被认为是适当哀悼的先决条件(1261):quam magna lacrimis pars adhuc nostris abest。后来的基督教传统则走了相反的道路，提醒我们在死亡的纪念中，有意识地将堕落与升华和净化结合在一起，巧妙地表现了枯萎的肉体。当然，这意味着围绕生与死创造了一个新的悖论，以及一种非常不同的身体交换的承诺——但那是另一个故事。装饰华丽的石棺出现在公元二世纪，这并非偶然，当时人们对身体的关注加剧，身体成为了话语的主要渠道
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Pub Date : 2010-12-15DOI: 10.1515/9783110216783.83
Francisco Prado-Vilar
The father prayed, called to his men to lift her with strength of hand swept in her robes aloft and prone above the altar, as you might lift a goat for sacrifice, with guards against the lips’ sweet edge, to check the curse cried on the house of Atreus by force of bit and speech drowned in strength. Pouring then to the ground her saffron mantle she struck the sacrificers with the eyes’ arrows of pity, lovely as in a painted scene, and striving to speak.
{"title":"3. Tragedy’s Forgotten Beauty: the Medieval Return of Orestes","authors":"Francisco Prado-Vilar","doi":"10.1515/9783110216783.83","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110216783.83","url":null,"abstract":"The father prayed, called to his men to lift her with strength of hand swept in her robes aloft and prone above the altar, as you might lift a goat for sacrifice, with guards against the lips’ sweet edge, to check the curse cried on the house of Atreus by force of bit and speech drowned in strength. Pouring then to the ground her saffron mantle she struck the sacrificers with the eyes’ arrows of pity, lovely as in a painted scene, and striving to speak.","PeriodicalId":340893,"journal":{"name":"Life, Death and Representation","volume":"21 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-12-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116255098","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2010-12-15DOI: 10.1515/9783110216783.359
J. Elsner
Roman art is strikingly rhetorical. In particular, sarcophagi – with their highly distinctive and restricted spatial field for visual representation and the relatively narrow range of formal devices employed to decorate them – are strongly so. By formal devices I mean the repertoire of compositional elements that make up sarcophagi, the repetition of iconographic types (whose differences and specific identities may depend on no more than a single attribute being present or absent, or the juxtaposition with another scene) and the particular (relatively restricted) range of treatments of the carved surface. The relatively limited range of formal elements, combined with a marked creativity and variation in their deployment, creates what is simultaneously an interrelated corpus of copious material (both pagan and Christian) and one in which many figurative images allude (at different levels) to narratives that may range from myth and oral tradition to scriptural texts. But each item claims rhetorical specificity and difference from the others through its employment (including its position, thematic juxtaposition, formal and technical treatment) by contrast with other standard elements. Since the era of Roman sarcophagi (at its heyday between roughly 100 and 400) coincides so closely with what is called the Second Sophistic, the great
{"title":"11. Image and Rhetoric in Early Christian Sarcophagi: Reflections on Jesus’ Trial","authors":"J. Elsner","doi":"10.1515/9783110216783.359","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110216783.359","url":null,"abstract":"Roman art is strikingly rhetorical. In particular, sarcophagi – with their highly distinctive and restricted spatial field for visual representation and the relatively narrow range of formal devices employed to decorate them – are strongly so. By formal devices I mean the repertoire of compositional elements that make up sarcophagi, the repetition of iconographic types (whose differences and specific identities may depend on no more than a single attribute being present or absent, or the juxtaposition with another scene) and the particular (relatively restricted) range of treatments of the carved surface. The relatively limited range of formal elements, combined with a marked creativity and variation in their deployment, creates what is simultaneously an interrelated corpus of copious material (both pagan and Christian) and one in which many figurative images allude (at different levels) to narratives that may range from myth and oral tradition to scriptural texts. But each item claims rhetorical specificity and difference from the others through its employment (including its position, thematic juxtaposition, formal and technical treatment) by contrast with other standard elements. Since the era of Roman sarcophagi (at its heyday between roughly 100 and 400) coincides so closely with what is called the Second Sophistic, the great","PeriodicalId":340893,"journal":{"name":"Life, Death and Representation","volume":"2014 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-12-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132565986","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2010-12-15DOI: 10.1515/9783110216783.vii
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