Approaching the visual in ancient culture: principles / Kathleen M. Coleman -- How did the Greeks translate traditional tales into images? / Luca Giuliani -- Image, myth, and epic on mosaics of the Late Roman West / Katherine M.D. Dunbabin -- Aurati laquearia caeli: Roman floor and ceiling decoration and the philosophical pose / Timothy M. O'Sullivan -- Roman coins and the new world of museums and digital images / Andrew Burnett and Dominic Oldman -- Approaching the visual in ancient culture: practicalities / Kathleen M. Coleman.
Summary:
Does the wine god ever drink? Why do artistic depictions of ancient myths sometimes "contradict" the textual versions that we think of as canonical? What caused the Romans to be anxious about decorated ceilings? Can numismatic images solve problems in Augustan politics or explain the provenance of the Warren Cup? How are the curators of ancient artifacts to supply the high-quality digital images that scholars need in order to answer these questions? And how are text-based scholars to make productive use of them? Images have their own semantic language, and their survival, usually divorced from their original context, makes it hard to interpret them with nuance and sophistication. This book starts from the premise that the visual and textual records from antiquity are indispensable complements to one another and demonstrates some of the ways in which text and image, taken together, can complicate and enrich our understanding of ancient culture. While attempting to dissolve the distinctions between text- and artifact-based scholars, it also tries to bridge the gap between academy and museum by exploring the challenges that the digital revolution poses to curators and sketching some of the ways in which image-based collections may be deployed in the future.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.