A History of Roman Art. Steven L. Tuck

      NOTE TO STUDENTS

      This note is designed to help you get the most out of the book by pointing out its approach, some of the features, and offering a time‐honored strategy for success.

      It is hard to overestimate the importance of Rome and Roman art to the modern western world. More than you may be aware, you are living in a world largely created by people who deliberately emulated the Romans. Forms of government, law, architecture, the arts, and infrastructure have all been modeled on the Roman versions. And, like our world, the Romans shared a visually based, international, multicultural culture. This is why Roman art carries such significance. In fact, the visual arts served the Romans, as they serve us, as the primary means of communicating (think of how many corporate logos you can instantly recognize and you’ll get an idea of the role of the visual in defining our world). You should be aware of the critical role art played in the Roman world, a world that is largely non‐literate, spread over three continents, and composed of a myriad of local cultures with unique and exclusive customs, traditions, laws, and beliefs. Taking a look at the map you can see the Roman Empire at its height covering an area from Scotland to Saudi Arabia and from Morocco to Armenia.

      This means that the visual messages projected by the art and architecture of the Roman world carry a critical set of information allowing the Romans to understand and navigate their world, goals you have as well. It matters because art represented the way people across the Roman Empire communicated their ideas, values, beliefs, and identities. These were all embedded in the art and could be unpacked by a Roman, and sometimes intentionally by a non‐Roman, audience, and, with some guidance from this book, by one today as well. And, of course, the subjects and forms they selected are still with us today. Now, about the features in the book and that promised strategy for success.

      If you’ll forgive some advice from a stranger, allow me to suggest a plan. When faced with a chapter, consider starting with the timeline and pictures. There are many pictures and, while we encourage you to read every word here, time spent looking at the pictures, truly studying the images of the art itself, is time well spent. Note that the captions each end in the date of the work. With a little practice you can teach yourself to glance down at that and start connecting images and dates from the beginning. So, look first at the timeline and pictures, only after that read the chapter, taking time to glance aside at the definitions in the margin. Finally, ideally following a class in which the material is covered, return to a visual review by looking at the pictures a second time. About those pictures: you should know that there is an inherent tension in the selection of images for each chapter and thus period. The tension is between works of art that are representative of art in the everyday Roman world and those that are cutting edge, leading to trends that will be developed in later periods or places. What you have before you is a mix of these two groups. It’s not all about the pictures though; we want you to read the text. To aid you in that we have created the marginal glossary as well as a number of sidebars and box features. These are pulled out to give them special emphasis and although it would be easy to skip them and just keep skimming the main text, you’ll find that stopping to read them will help your understanding of the main text.

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.