Style and Meaning in Late Antique Art: Ancients and Moderns on Seeing and Thinking

by Sarah Bassett

Overview

How do we best see and understand the art of late antiquity? One of the perceived challenges of so doing is that this is a period whose visual production has been defined as stylistically abstract and emotionally spiritual, and therefore elusive. But this is a perception which – in her path-breaking new book – Sarah Bassett boldly challenges, offering two novel lines of interpretative inquiry. She first argues, by focusing on the art of late antiquity in late nineteenth-century Viennese intellectual and artistic circles, that that period's definition of late antique form was in fact a response to contemporaneous political concerns, anticipating modernist thinking and artistic practice. She then suggests that late antique viewers never actually abandoned a sense of those mimetic goals that characterized Greek and Roman habits of representation. This interpretative shift is transformative because it allows us to understand the full range and richness of late antique visual experience.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781009466325
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	08/08/2024
Pages:	257
Product dimensions:	7.28(w) x 10.43(h) x 0.67(d)

About the Author

Sarah Bassett is Associate Professor of Art History and Adjunct Associate Professor of Classical Studies at Indiana University Bloomington. She is the author of The Urban Image of Late Antique Constantinople (Cambridge University Press, 2004) and editor of the Cambridge Companion to Constantinople (2022). Her research and writing interests include late antique urbanism, collecting and display in the ancient world, and the historiography of late antique and Byzantine art.

Table of Contents

Introduction; Part I. Moderns: 1. Exploring the 'Dark Continent': Franz Wickhoff, Alois Riegl, and the first definitions of late antiqute art; 2. Rome on the Danube: late antique art and Austrian identity; 3. East meets West: archaeology, art history, and the crystallization of late antique art; 4. Building vocabulary in the 'Epoch of the Great Spiritual'; Part II. Ancients: 5. The styles of mimesis; 6. Storytelling and the 'illusive similitude of life'; 7. Ceremonial images and the 'amplification of good things'; 8. Portraits civic and sacred; 9. Conclusion: an art of persuasion.

Editorial Reviews

‘This book straddles intellectual history, art history, historiography, and classical studies to make a compelling case that ancient Greco-Roman viewers did perceive style as a meaningful part of the ancient pictorial vocabulary, and to demonstrate how. It is an erudite book, yet it wears its learning lightly. … The amount of scholarship that it distills and renders comprehensible is truly impressive.’ Diliana Angelova, Associate Professor of Art History, University of California, Berkeley

‘This is a thoughtful and ambitious book - rich, learned, original - revealing of long and serious reflection … a significant achievement.’ Elizabeth Sears, George H. Forsyth Junior Collegiate Professor of History of Art, University of Michigan

From the Publisher