ROMAN ART

Background

- The Romans were incredible in the field of art

- They were great painters of still life.

- They erected buildings of a scale and design undreamed of before their time.

Sculpture

- One of their greatest accomplishments was portrait sculpture, which began to emerge in the 3rd cent BC.

- The characteristics of the Roman patrons themselves, inspired the realistic sculpture.

- Roman artists were familiar with the idealized sculpture of Periclean Greece and with the sentimentalized realism of Hellenistic art.

- They knew Etruscan funerary sculpture

- The Roman practice of making death masks revealed the sags and lines of age.

- But most important, it was the Roman's individualism, his matter of factness, his interest in the here and now that made him demand utter truthfulness in images of himself and those surrounding him

- The Altar of Peace, a great masterpiece carved in marble during the reign of Augustus Caesar, shows the imperial family offering sacrifice.

Painting

- In painting, the Romans introduced still life painting while they continued to paint the mythical and historical subjects that the Greeks and Etruscans had introduced.

- The talent of Roman artists is known to us almost exclusively through wall paintings.

- Very few free-standing paintings have survived.

- Styles of painting changed over the centuries. (transparency) Woman Playing the Cithara.

- After the mid-1st century, painters created a purer form of expression, representing people in a warmer, freer way with a feeling of mood and scene

Mosaics

- The new appreciation of nature first seen in Roman still-life painting was also evident in the production of great mosaics.

- The intense animal scene (transparency) is from Hadrian's villa and is made of many pieces of marble that were fitted together to form a pattern in the floor.