The Roman Nude Heroic Portrait Statuary 200 BC - AD 300

by Hallett, Christopher H.

• ISBN13: 9780199240494
• ISBN10: 0199240493
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-12-08
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Statues of important Romans frequently represented them nude. Men were portrayed naked holding weapons - the naked emperor might wield the thunderbolt of Jupiter - while Roman women assumed the guise of the nude love-goddess, Venus. When faced with these strange images, modern viewers areusually unsympathetic, finding them incongruous, even tasteless. They are mostly written off as just another example of Roman 'bad taste'.This book offers a new approach. Comprehensively illustrated with black and white photographs of nude Romans represented in a wide range of artistic media, it investigates how this tradition arose, and how the nudity of these images was meant to be understood by contemporary viewers. And, since theRomans also employed a variety of other costumes for their statues (toga, armour, Greek philosopher's cloak), it asks, 'What could nudity express that other costumes could not?' It is Hallett's claim that - looked at in this way - these 'Roman nudes' turn out to be documents of the first importancefor the cultural historian.

Author Biography

Christopher H. Hallett is Associate Professor of History of Art and Classics at the University of California at Berkeley.

Table of Contents

List of Figures	ix
List of Plates	x
List of Abbreviations	xviii
Introduction	1	(4)
The Greek Background	5	(15)
The Nude Portrait in Greek Art	20	(41)
Attitudes towards Nudity at Rome	61	(41)
The Roman Adoption of the Nude Portrait	102	(57)
The Nude Portrait under the Empire	159	(64)
Nudity and Divine Symbols	223	(48)
Understanding the Roman Nude	271	(74)
Appendices
A. Previous Studies of the Subject	309	(3)
B. List of Roman Nude Portraits	312	(21)
C. Two Cuirassed Portraits from the Temple of Mithradates Eupator on Delos	333	(1)
D. The Cloak Worn by Portraits in Heroic Costume	334	(2)
E. Scale Armour in Roman Art and Literature	336	(1)
F. Two Portraits in Heroic Costume Identified as Pompeius Magnus	337	(1)
G. The Larger Cloak Worn by Some Imperial Hip-Mantle Portraits	338	(1)
H. The Use of the Aegis in Imperial Portraiture in Cameos and Major Statuary	339	(1)
I. Flavian (and later) Cuirassed Portraits Added to Pre-existing Julio-Claudian Portrait Groups	340	(1)
J. The Return of Military Imagery to Imperial Iconography after its Renunciation by Augustus	341	(1)
K. Further Known (or Suspected) Galleries of Multiple Portraits of a Single Individual	342	(1)
L. The toga picta as Worn by Portraits of Roman Magistrates	343	(1)
M. The Portrait venatorio habitu from the Tomb of Claudia Semne	344	(1)
Bibliography	345	(14)
Index Locorum	359	(8)
Museum Index of Roman Nude Portrait Statues	367	(10)
General Index	377